Configuring problem-solving methods: a CAKE perspective

Abstract Over the past few years a certain amount of research has been done on ways of configuring problem-solving methods from smaller-grained components. Although frameworks for method configuration have been explored in previous studies, ways of developing and maintaining a library of reusable knowledge have not been fully integrated into the frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to provide a view of bridging the architecture of component assembling and the knowledge contents, on the basis of our experiences in the area of scheduling problems. First, existing component-oriented approaches are briefly reviewed. We then introduce the concept of a computer-aided knowledge engineering (CAKE) environment, which consists of not only processes for constructing knowledge systems, but also processes for developing knowledge libraries to be reused for the prospective systems. The content issues in a class of scheduling problems are pursued in terms of the representation primitives of the task and method, the task-specific components to be configured into problem-solving methods, and the process of obtaining those components. Taking account of the knowledge contents, we explore the architectural issues related to our development environment, and give running examples for the task analysis, component retrieval and component configuration. Finally, we compare related studies on reuse-oriented development environments.