Comparative Evaluation of Three Expert System Development Tools: Kee, Knowledge Craft, Art

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare three of the most powerful expert system tools available: KEE from Intellicorp, Knowledge Craft from The Carnegie Group Inc., and ART from Inference Corporation.These three tools are industrial development environments which are fully supported and well beyond research prototypes. They were implemented on Lisp machines initially, but will soon be available on conventional computers. The three systems are very flexible and offer many ways of representing knowledge.The first part of the paper is a technical overview of each tool. The second part presents their common features. The third part discusses the advantages and drawbacks of each, according to types of application.This work has been partially sponsored by the Commission of the European communities within the Esprit Project 932 entitled ‘Knowledged-based Real-Time supervision in Computer Integrated Manufacturing’. We are grateful to Didier Gaget-Soufflot (Graphael, France) and Bernard Raust (CGE/TITN) for their participation in the evaluation of KEE and ART respectivily.