Using objects to manage in-memory data intensive expert systems

This report discusses the experience we gained developing the Dealer Consultant Expert System (DCES), and the role objects play in the representation and management of the immense amount of data the system analyzes. In particular, we discuss some of the innovative ideas and benefits we realized by using objects to: 1) manipulate the large amount of data that form the core of the expert system; 2) reason with an embedded inference engine on application objects constructed in C++; and 3) implement multiple representations for data access, procedural manipulation and inferencing. The next section introduces an overview of the project and its current status. Section 3 presents the application architecture and the methodology used for development. Section 4 discusses our experience in using objects for inmemory data representation and manipulation. The last two sections summarize lessons learned and future plans.