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Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einesDoktors der Wirtschaftswissenschaften (Dr. rer. pol.)von der Fakult¨at f¨ur Wirtschaftswissenschaftender Universit¨at Fridericiana zu Karlsruhegenehmigte Dissertation
Tool Support for Finding andPreventing Faults in Rule Bases
von
M.S./USA Valentin Zacharias
Tag der m¨undlichen Pr¨ufung: 18.12.2008Referent: Prof. Dr. Rudi StuderKorreferent: Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Waldmann
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Abstract
The starting point for this thesis was the apparent contradiction betweenthe perception of rule bases as simple to create and the experience of rule bases as hard to debug and difficult to create without faults. This contra-diction was analyzed using data from a survey of developers, experimentsand experiences from three rule base development projects. From the ag-gregationofthisanalysisusingthedevelopedfaultlifecyclemodel,testing,debugging, static analysis and visualization were chosen as concrete andparticularly promising approaches for tackling this fault prevention chal-lenge. Each of these areas was further examined within the context of thisthesis.In the area of
testing
, a formal account of the notions of the test entitieswas developed, a novel test coverage measure based on least general gen-eralization was conceived and a testing framework based on these notionswasimplementedandevaluated. Theevaluationovermorethan100hoursshowedtheusefulnessandimportanceoftheconceptsandtheirimplemen-tation.To better support the
debugging
of rule bases, Explorative Debugging wasproposed as a novel and purely declarative debugging paradigm for thesesystems. An experiment comparing Explorative Debugging to the state of theartproceduraldebuggingparadigmshowedasignificantimprovementin the time needed to identify faults, while the accuracy increased.To improve the
static analysis
for fault detection, an anomaly detectionframework for F-logic was developed. This framework is the first of itskindforF-logicanditincludesthefirstimplementationofstatictypecheck-ing for F-logic. It is mostly implemented in F-logic itself, integrated into arule engineering environment and easily extensible.Finally, to support users in understanding the rule base and the conse-quences of changes to it, a novel approach to the
visualization
of the struc-ture of the rule base was developed. The novelty of this approach lies inthe use of runtime rule interactions to show the overall structure of the rule base.iii
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