The KB paradigm and its application to interactive configuration
This addresses the difficulty in creating effective software for interactive configuration tasks in industry, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing paradigm to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of developing software for interactive configuration problems by applying the knowledge base paradigm, which uses formal domain knowledge and logical inference to assist users in finding valid configurations, and demonstrates a proof of concept in a real-life banking application.
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. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).