Author(s)

H. Atabakhsh

Abstract

Rule-based reasoning has been integrated in a pure object-oriented environ- ment taking advantage of the benefits offered by both paradigms by imple- menting a number of key expert system features in Smalltalk-80. A software toolkit has resulted called ExTool, which offers facilities for the user to create, modify and delete flexible production rules with no knowledge of the underly- ing programming language. In ExTool, decision-making is distributed rather than centralized in one large knowledge base. Inferencing is, therefore, oppor- tunistic and is performed only on a subset of the relevant rules. The knowledge base is decomposed into a number of smaller knowledge bases representing specific decision-rules associated with only those objects involved in decision-

Keywords