Abstract
The knowledge base paradigm aims to express domain knowledge in a rich formal language, and to use this domain knowledge as a knowledge base to solve various problems and tasks that arise in the domain by applying multiple forms of inference. As such, the paradigm applies a strict separation of concerns between information and problem solving. In this paper, we analyze the principles and feasibility of the knowledge base paradigm in the context of an important class of applications: interactive configuration problems. In interactive configuration problems, a configuration of interrelated objects under constraints is searched, where the system assists the user in reaching an intended configuration. It is widely recognized in industry that good software solutions for these problems are very difficult to develop. We investigate such problems from the perspective of the KB paradigm. We show that multiple functionalities in this domain can be achieved by applying different forms of logical inferences on a formal specification of the configuration domain. We report on a proof of concept of this approach in a real-life application with a banking company.
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Notes
- 1.
In the rest of this paper, a domain atom is treated as a term that evaluates to true or false.
- 2.
We note that \(\le _p\) is a partial order and denote \(min_{\le _p}\) for all minimal elements of a set according to that order.
- 3.
More info about this implementation, a downloadable demo and another example of a configuration system developed with IDP as an engine (a simpler course configuration demo) can be found at: http://www.configuration.tk.
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Pieter, V.H., Dasseville, I., Janssens, G., Denecker, M. (2016). The KB Paradigm and Its Application to Interactive Configuration. In: Gavanelli, M., Reppy, J. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9585. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28228-2_2
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