Intelligent inference within objects using constraint rules

Knowledge and inference are the two key features of an intelligent system. Insufficiency of structural representation and reusability are the major weakness of knowledge based systems. On the other hand, OO technology is very powerful in reusability and structural representation. Therefore, to co-operate knowledge based system techniques with object-oriented design strategies seems to be a good strategy in software development. To achieve this goal, this paper introduces the concepts of intelligent objects, knowledge objects and inference objects, and presents the intelligent object model which is an extension of traditional OO model. As an example of the application a configuration problem is considered.