1995 BRAC Commission

Navy Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head - Data Call. Part 4 of 4. Box 183, L-115

Assessment of applications for the house renovations grants system : an IT support framework

This thesis describes the development of a knowledge-based framework for supportinghuman experts from the Department of Environmental and Consumer Services of theSalford City Council in assessing applications for the current house renovation grant system(HRGS).The resulting system implements an architecture which integrates case-based reasoningprocesses with other problem solving methods. In addition, the system's architectureintegrates different types of knowledge which are required by the problem solving methods.Some of the main features of the system's architecture are its modularity and itsindependence from the implementation shell. The system was implemented using Kappa-PC which is a shell designed for implementing knowledge-based systems.The implementation followed the Client Centred Approach method. A number of lessonswere learned from the implementation process. The implementation was carried outtogether with the verification and validation of the system. The verification and validationmethods employed allowed the author to focus the evaluation on different features andcomponents of the system. A number of test cases were employed during the validation.Client's experts and other independent experts were involved in the validation of thesystem. Each validation step was followed by refinement of the main system's components.This research has demonstrated that various problem solving methods are required forperforming the different tasks of the assessment of applications for the HRGS. Theimplemented system has been reasonably successful in demonstrating that a singleframework which integrates various methods can be used for supporting human experts inassessing applications for the FIRGS. Therefore, the system has proved to perform asaccurately as human experts do for all of the tasks. The system has been described as verypromising by the Client's experts