Methodology for developing an assessment expert system using a planning paradigm

An assessment expert system evaluates the information provided by the external environment and produces hypotheses of the current world state. In an example application in the commercial-aircraft domain, an onboard sensor suite provides information concerning other airplanes within the aircraft's airspace. A planning paradigm provides explicit control through a meta-assessment capability. A development methodology for an assessor using this paradigm consists of the following steps: design the object hierarchy, design the internal interfaces, develop the assessment grammar, produce an appropriate plan library, and design and implement the rule base. The most important step is the development of the assessment grammar, since it must be understood by external agents such as a pilot or other expert systems in a multiagent system and be rich enough to provide concise hypotheses of the world