This paper provides a methodology, or process, that can be used to construct expert systems. The methodology is suited primarily for building troubleshooting, advisory, and diagnostic expert systems; however, it also can be useful for building other types of systems.

Management at Mary Kay Cosmetics supported development of an expert system (ES) to assist with the problems inherent with package design. Although the ES performed well and was clearly beneficial, use of the ES discontinued after a short time and the package design process returned to pre-ES practices. Within the context of this case this paper describes from a managerial perspective how and wh...

In mechanical design, there is often unavoidable uncertainty in estimates of design performance. Evaluation of design alternatives requires consideration of the impact of this uncertainty. Expert heuristics embody assumptions regarding the designer's attitude towards risk and uncertainty that might be reasonable in most cases but inaccurate in others. We present a technique to allow designers t...

The SHYSTER project is concerned with the development of a hybrid legal expert system. The case-based part of SHYSTER chooses the cases upon which to base its opinion by measuring the similarity between previously-decided cases and the case in question. Statisticians make use of many di erent similarity measures, however|for SHYSTER|each of the commonly used similarity measures reduces to one o...

This paper investigates an approach to providing a general-purpose authoring/tutoring shell for intelligent computer assisted learning systems. The approach is to outline an object-oriented representation of task/goal hierarchies, then to consider the ways in which domain expertise, student information and teacher expertise can be made to interact with such hierarchies. The result is a skeleton...