Performance Assessment and Incremental Evaluation of Rule-based Systems

Contents

Rule-based systems that are easily testable are required for high reliability applications. However, as a rule base evolves, developers prefer incremental evaluation owing to the high cost of regression testing. For, quality aatd reliability improvement, researchers advocate that the evaluation phase be integrated with development: thus, incremental evaluation becomes more important in this context. In this paper, we propose a three-tiered lifecycle model for integrating evaluation in a rulebased system life cycle. We then explore two specific issues from a system’s evaluation perspective: (1) the limitation of functional testing for performance evaluation; and (2) the optimization the cost and effort for evaluation by using incremental methods, whenever possible. This research was motivated by our experience in the design and evaluation of rule-based systems.