ICONE - Intelligent Assistance for Configuration Knowledge Base Development and Maintenance

http://www.ist.tugraz.at/icone.html

15% - 40% of the overall costs of a configurator project are related to configuration knowledge base (KB) development and maintenance. Therefore, one of the most important challenges in the development and maintenance of knowledge bases is the effective support of knowledge engineering tasks. The basis of effective knowledge base development and maintenance operations is the understanding of the KB and the support of fault identification and repair. These issues are within the major focus of the ICONE project. The ICONE knowledge acquisition environment will include the following functionalities: Preferred diagnoses: based on a given set of test cases and complexity metrics, preferred diagnoses are calculated and presented to the knowledge engineer. Redundancy detection: in addition to detection of inconsistencies in the knowledge base, ICONE components will support the identification of redundancies which can deteriorate the performance of search algorithms and increase knowledge acquisition overheads. Automated generation of test cases: in the context of diagnosis, test cases will be automatically generated and used in regression tests. Intelligent quality management: complexity metrics and refactoring rules which are especially developed for configuration scenarios will help to improve the quality of (configuration) knowledge bases. Intelligent analysis and navigation: knowledge engineers will be supported by recommender algorithms in the analysis, development, and maintenance of knowledge bases.