Cased-Based Reasoning: A New Technology for Experience Based Construction of Knowledge Systems

We will discuss the role of case-based reasoning - a new emerging technology that contributes to solving the well-known problems of software maintenance, reuse, and quality improvement by storing, retrieving and adapting similar past cases - in this new light. Case-based reasoning, which has proven to be of practical importance by a large number of industrial/business applications, is a flexible approach to software development that has overcome the indicated difficulties to a large extent. We will point out in which way case-based reasoning takes up the separation issue by a certain decomposition idea in order to offer a useful flexibility required to adapt software production in a changing world. One important contribution of case-based reasoning technology is that it allows to reduce the "update complexity" to a smaller dimension. We will show for which kinds of application tasks case-based reasoning is more flexible than other approaches and we will illustrate this using the introduced general structure of a case-based reasoning system. From a software engineering perspective future research on case-based reasoning will deal with the analysis of which kind the "invariants of case-based reasoning" are. These invariants need to be standardized, as well as the corresponding methods. As a conclusion we will draw the attention to some points which seem to be important for future directions in research on and applications with case based reasoning technology.

ICSI Technical Report TR-97-008

Technical Report