MAPCon: a case study in a configuration expert system

TLDR: A taxonomy of reasoning objectives is developed and shown how MAPCon combines two different kinds of reasoning to accomplish its objectives, suggesting that building robust, practical systems will require us to understand more clearly the interfaces among different reasoning objectives.

Abstract: MAPCon II is the second generation (Muralidhar and Irish, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Commumcctions 6(5), 869–873, 1988) of an expert system that interactively guides a user in performing off-line configuration for local area networks that use MAP, the manufacturing automation protocol. This paper describes the configuration task in general and MAPCon in particular. Though MAPCon's purpose is off-line configuration, its problem domain requires that it accomplish other reasoning objectives in addition to those commonly associated with configuration. It is in the process of being expanded into an on-line network supervisor. We develop a taxonomy of reasoning objectives and show how MAPCon combines two different kinds of reasoning to accomplish its objectives. Our experience confirms that of other researchers, and suggests that building robust, practical systems will require us to understand more clearly the interfaces among different reasoning objectives. The paper has four parts: 1. a definition of configuration and other reasoning objectives; 2. a summary of the problem domain in which MAPCon operates; 3. a description of MAPCon as the user sees it; 4. a look ‘under the hood’ to see how MAPCon combines different objectives.