Toward structured expert systems development

摘要

Expert systems development is being presented as an art by many proponents of the expert systems technology. Such a perspective was also popular in the early stages of conventional programming. Today, however, conventional programming has become more of an engineering discipline than an art. The purpose of this paper is to advocate the engineering approach to expert systems development and illustrate it. Specifically, a model of expert systems development is proposed that includes the use of slightly adapted techniques of structured systems analysis. This model has been applied to a “real life” project, and the results encourage further use of structured systems analysis in the development of expert systems.