A tool-supported approach to inter-tabular verification

The use of decision tables to verify knowledge based systems (KBS) has been advocated several times in the validation and verification (V&V) literatur e. However, one of the main drawbacks of these systems is that they fail to detect anomalies that occur over rule chains. In a decision table based co ntext this means that anomalies that occur due to interactions between tabl es are neglected. These anomalies are called inter-tabular anomalies. In th is paper we investigate an approach that deals with inter-tabular anomalies . One of the prerequisites for the approach was that it could be used by th e knowledge engineer during the development of the KBS. This requires that the anomaly check can be performed on-line. As a result, the approach partl y uses heuristics where exhaustive checks would be too inefficient. All det ection facilities that will be described have been implemented in a table-b ased development tool called PROLOGA. The use of this tool will be briefly illustrated. In addition, some experiences in verifying large knowledge bas es are discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.