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USING AN EXPERT SYSTEM

by Armin Eberlein,Dale Fukami & Wonh Chieh Lam

Start ý Method ý Implementation ý Results ý Sources and PDF

RESULTS

The current results are still preliminary because the interface layer is being refined. However, initial results are promising. The methodology is completely implemented in the Telos language and, together with the intelligence models, provides comprehensive guidance to the developer. The expert system can be asked what further work is needed for a certain requirement or a requirements document and responds to the user with instructions for the tasks that are necessary to further develop the system specification according to the implemented methodology. The user also is informed about any actions that violate constraints specified in the database, preventing incorrect use of the development methodology. This shows that the initial objective of the research is met and intelligent support for the traditionally difficult first phase of the system development life cycle can be provided using an expert system.

Requirements management issues are addressed by the links that are created among the requirements. This allows the tracing of a requirement back to its initial source and caters to the impact analysis of a change request.

EVALUATION

In order to evaluate the approach, a case study is planned. Connections to the telecommunications industry are already established, and the experimental development of an intelligent network service is intended. The framework for requirements engineering has already been adapted to the intelligent network (IN) architecture by mapping the system level of the framework to the service level of the architecture, the high-level components to the service features, and the low-level components to the service-independent building blocks. This customization offers more possibilities for intelligent support.

The case study is expected to reveal any shortcomings of the overall approach of using an expert system for the early system development life cycle and offers the possibility to mature the methodology. Scalability is also of concern and modifications might become necessary to allow the development of large-scale systems using this expert system. Currently, this is one of the major issues. The use of the ConceptBase tool for requirements engineering can easily result in a number of objects that drastically slow down database queries. Although the current experimentation still performs well, a large-scale case study will require a high-performance workstation to ensure acceptable response times and usability.

WHAT WEýVE LEARNED

The requirements engineering methodology and its implementation in a tool aptly portray the use of an expert system to facilitate the gathering of requirements information. The tool provides active and passive guidance at various levels to the system developer, resulting in a high-quality specification of the new system. This will result in faster time-to-market and increased reliability and customer satisfaction.

I encourage the expert system community to use expert systems not only for specific domains, but to apply them to software development as well. The software community is still struggling with many difficulties and would welcome any support for developing reliable software that meets customersý needs. Widening the scope, the general use of artificial intelligence during system development is an area of research that requires much more work, but has great potential for success.

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