Preliminary Steps Toward a Taxonomy of Problem-Solving Methods

Abstract

Although efforts, some successful, to develop expert systems (application systems that can perform knowledge-intensive tasks) have been going on now for almost 20 years, we are not yet very good at describing the variations in problem-solving methods that these systems use, nor do we have much of an understanding of how to characterize the methods in terms of features of the types of tasks for which they are appropriate. This chapter takes a few steps toward creating a taxonomy of methods -- a taxonomy that identifies some of the discriminating characteristics of the methods expert systems use and that suggests how methods can be mapped onto tasks.