Performance Evaluation of the Inference Structure in Expert System

There are a v a r i e t y of f ac to r s that a f f e c t the performance of an expert system. This paper presents an eva lua t i ng method focus ing on the complex i ty , costs and e f f i c i e n c y of in ference s t r u c t u r e in a r u l e / Knowledge-source based expert system. The performance measuring fac to rs proposed here, when fedback to Knowledge engineers, can help them gain a q u a n t i t a t i v e understanding of reasoning performance of Knowledge acquired at the ( e a r l y ) stages of the development l i f e c y c l e , and enable them to make a numeric comparison and a choice among several s t r u c t u r e s , or have some re f inements . This paper also presents some a p p l i c a t i o n examples of t h i s eva lua t i ng method and descr ibes an eva lua t i ng f a c i l i t y based on i t .