Improving the Quality of Solutions in Domain Evolving Environments

The development of industrial case-based reasoning systems that have to operate within a continually evolving environment, is a challenging problem. Industrial applications require of robust and competent systems. When the problem domain is evolving, the solutions provided by the system can easily become wrong. In this paper we present an algorithm for dealing with real-world domains where case solutions are evolving along the time. Specifically, the algorithm deals with what we call the innovation problem: the continuous improvements on the components that are part of case solutions. We will show how the use of the proposed algorithm improves significantly the quality of solutions in a deployed engineering design system.