Distributing case-base maintenance: The collaborative maintenance approach

Case-base maintenance is an important emerging issue for case-base reasoner s as they scale up to handle real-world problems in unstable environments. Over time, the contents of a case base may become out of date or inconsiste nt with the target problem space, and maintenance strategies must be devise d to help recognize and repair these problems by deleting, adding, or modif ying cases, for example. In this article we describe a maintenance framewor k called collaborative maintenance (CM), which has been designed to facilit ate, monitor, and control the incremental update of live, dynamic case base s. Our approach is novel in that it automatically supports a distributed, i nteractive maintenance process-users are permitted to recommend case update s, and the collaborative maintenance process ensures that these recommendat ions are properly reviewed and actioned.