The organization of expert systems, a tutorial

This is a tutorial about the organization of expert problem-solving programs. We begin with a restricted class of problems that admits a very simple organization. To make this organization feasible it is required that the input data be static and reliable and that the solution space be small enough to search exhaustively. These assumptions are then relaxed, one at a time, in case study of ten more sophisticated organizational prescriptions. The first cases give techniques for dealing with unreliable data and time-varying data. Other cases show techniques for creating and reasoning with abstract solution spaces and using multiple lines of reasoning. The prescriptions are compared for their coverage and illustrated by examples from recent expert systems.