Managing Dependencies in Knowledge-Based Systems

In knowledge-based engineering, the inference engine plays an important part in the behaviour of the system. A flexible and adaptive execution scheme allows the designer to experiment with different modes of operation and selecting an appropriate one with respect to the initial data set and the execution goal. This book presents an extension of an existing research prototype software in the field of knowledge-based engineering, with the goal of building a reliable and easy to use dependency resolution engine. A discussion is included how the knowledge concepts and objects can be represented in an abstract mathematical form, converting at the same time the problem of dependency resolution to a more formally specified one. Some algorithms and methods that are used to operate on the data set will be discussed from both a theoretical and programming point of view, analyzing their complexity, proposing and testing their implementation. This book could be of utility primarily to engineers and researchers working in the field of design automation, particularly knowledge-based systems, but anyone interested in algorithms and programming may find it useful.