Knowledge Maintenance of Case-Based Reasoning Systems

For all technical systems that are widely used, maintenance processes are available. This text should be of both academic and commercial interest to provide structured and cost-effective maintenance of deployed CBR systems. The main idea to solve the maintenance problem is to employ a control loop on CBR systems, to observe its performance and to counteract any change that is not desired. Those changes, in principle, come from two sources. Changes may be due to the use of the system, for instance, when it learns new cases or it may be due to changes of the environment such as changes in legislation, in technology or in norms. In order to realize the control loop, the most widely used CBR process model was enhanced and placed in a broader context that regards the whole life cycle of a CBR system. The four phases - setup, initialization, application and maintenance - form the basis of the SIAM methodology. SIAM extends the INRECA methodology that provides a framework for developing CBR solutions. With SIAM, better maintainable Case-Based Reasoning applications can be developed.