REFINEMENT COMPLEMENTS VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION

Knowledge based systems are being applied in ever increasing numbers. The development of knowledge acquisition tools has eased the ''Knowled ge Acquisition Bottleneck''. More recently there has been a demand for mechanisms to assure the quality of knowledge based systems. Checking the contents of the knowledge base and the performance of the knowled ge based systems at various stages throughout its life cycle is an imp ortant component of quality assurance. Hence, the demand now is for ve rification and validation tools. However, traditionally, verification and validation have identified possible faults in the knowledge base. In contrast, this paper advocates the use of knowledge refinement to c orrect identified faults in parallel with the ongoing verification and validation, thus easing the progress towards correct knowledge based systems. An automated refinement tool is described which uses the outp ut from verification and validation tools to assemble evidence from wh ich the refinement process can propose repairs. It is hoped that autom ated refinement in parallel with validation and verification may ease the ''Knowledge V & V Bottleneck''. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited.