On the verification of an expert system: Practical issues

Abstract

The Verification and Validation (V&V) process states whether the software requirements specifications have been correctly and completely fulfilled. The methodologies proposed in software engineering showed to be inadequate for Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) validation, since KBS present some particular characteristics [1]. Designing KBS for dynamic environments requires the consideration of Temporal knowledge Reasoning and Representation (TRR) issues. Albeit, the last significant developments in TRR area, there is still a considerable gap for its successful use in practical applications. VERITAS is an automatic tool developed for KBS verification, it is currently in development and is being tested with SPARSE, a KBS used in the Portuguese Transmission Network (REN) for incident analysis and power restoration. In this paper some solutions are proposed for still open issues on Verification of KBS applied in critical domains.