Экспертная система Kappa / SAMPLES / CONFIG / README

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PC CONFIGURATION DEMO
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Hardware configuration of Personal Computers running MS/DOS.

What KAPPA-PC features are shown in this demo?

- Hardware configuration using pure object-oriented development
- Decision on hardware shipment using a mixture of rule-based (option of
forward or backward chaining) reasoning and object-oriented features
(sending message to calculate shipping costs)
- Display of solutions using KAPPA-PC's graphics, including
multiple sessions
- Graphical development environment
- Connection to foreign databases (read from Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII
and OS2/EE to KAPPA-PC; write from KAPPA-PC to Lotus 1-2-3,
dBaseIII and Excel in this example).


To load the demo:

1. From the directory in which you installed KAPPA-PC:
cd samples\config
2. At the DOS prompt, type: config


To run the demo:

0. Click on the "Help" button to display this file in a KAPPA
Transcript image. Right click to exit this on-line help.

1. Click on the "Configure" button. The system will configure your
computer hardware based on software requirements (e.g. Windows 3.0
requires EGA display or higher, and 2 Mb of RAM is recommended).

Notes:
- Graphics and menus are integrated in KAPPA-PC and built using
KAPPA-PC's object system (bitmaps, menus, buttons, reports on the screen
are all KAPPA-PC's graphics; the keyboard, CPU, display and mouse images
are taken in bitmap format from MicroGrafx's designer. Other CAD and
graphics packages that KAPPA-PC can interface to are Corel Draw, Paint,
PaintBrush, etc. KAPPA-PC supports .bmp and .wmf files.
- For a system with a large number of possible software and hardware
requirements, KAPPA-PC is the tool of choice because it has efficient
memory management schemes (compact code and application size).
- This part of the demo was completely built using Object Oriented
Programming (OOP) which means faster development, reduced maintenance
cost, etc.

2. Click on the "Order" button. The system will generate an order
form for the softwares you chose and the hardware components
recommended during the Configuration step. Again this report is
built with KAPPA-PC graphics, mainly Transcript images.

3. Click on the "Main Menu" button. This will bring you back to the
starting point.

4. Click on the "Ship" button. This will help you decide which company
to use for the shipping. You will be asked 3 questions. For each of
them, you can click on the "Comment" button to get more information
about the question.
Then, choosing "Show all possible carriers" will invoke a rule set in
forward chaining to analyse all possible shipping companies (this process
is really DATA DRIVEN and this is what forward chaining is good for).
Choosing "Check on Approval for specified carrier" will invoke the rule
set in backward chaining to find out the validity of one specific company
(this process is more GOAL DRIVEN, and the goal here is a variable stored
in the Global object).

Note:
- This part was built using rule-based reasoning that allows you to add
heuristics, rules of thumb, and expertise to your application.

5. Click on the "Update Information" button. This will show you how easy
it is to interface KAPPA-PC with other PC products. Basically, all the
information displayed (such as pricing, part number, ...) could be
extracted from a database or spreadsheet.
Choose one Database and one action (Read or Write) and click on
the "OK" button when you are done.

Note:
- With DDE, we can also seamlessly interface to any other DDE-enabled
MS-Windows application (e.g. Excel, Toolbook, SuperBase 4, etc.)


To quit the demo:

- Click the "Quit" button. IMPORTANT: Do not save the changes !!

Notes:
To see the underlying model, you can:
- Maximize the Object Browser and look at the objects.
- Pop-up the "Rule Relations" window and focus on "ShipRule1" for example.
- Pop-up the "Rule Trace" and "Inference Browser" window.

For the "Rule Trace", first select all rules and slots to be traced.
Next, go into "Active Trace" and select "Step Mode". When prompted with
the arguments to the forward chaining, just hit the "backspace" key
to erase all of them.

For the "Inference Browser" if you already had chosen to backward chain
previously, the browser will be filled with a colorful array of rules and
slots. If not, again choose Step mode, and enter "ShippingGoal" as
the name of the goal.


Have Fun, and if you have any questions, feel free to call your KAPPA
Support number !