An Intelligent MCDM Approach for Selecting the Suitable Expert System Building Tool

Expert Systems (ES), a promising branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have achieved considerable success in recent years. This area of AI has concentrated on the construction of high-performance programs in specialized professional domains. Building a new expert system is a major investment. Choosing the right expert system building tool or shell is critical to the success and failure of such investment. The selection of a suitable tool requires consideration of a comprehensive set of factors and balancing of multiple objectives in determining the suitability of a particular tool for building a defined expert system application. Because of the complexity of the problem a number of tools must be deployed to arrive at the proper solution. A new decision making approach is presented in which Expert Systems, and Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques (MCDM) are integrated systematically in solving expert system building tool selection problem. To implement the proposed decision-making approach, a prototype system was developed in which ES, and MCDM methods (Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)) were successfully integrated by using the Component Object Model (COM) technology to achieve software interoperability among the systems components. A typical example is also presented to demonstrate the application of the prototype system. Keyword: Expert Systems, MCDM, AHP, ES building tools selection, ES shells. Received March 28, 2006; accepted July 23, 2006