EXPERT SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATION: RULES ARE BAD, OBJECTS ARE GOOD

This paper summarizes the author's four-year research on examining rule-based programming (RBP) and object-oriented programming (OOP) for expert systems implementation. It reaches two conclusions. First, with a few exceptions, RBP is simply not working in practice. Second, many rule-based problems can be solved with OOP with improved system understandability and maintainability. This paper aims at (1) clarifying some of the confusion surrounding expert systems technology, and (2) providing a practical direction for expert systems implementation.