Knowledge refinement to debug and maintain a tablet formulation system

Knowledge refinement tools have commonly been applied to diagnostic applications. This paper considers the refinement of a design application. It explores the differences in knowledge content and problem-solving steps for design rather than diagnosis systems, and investigates additional refinement operators. Although the problem-solving task itself tends to be more complex, this in fact puts more constraints on the results of the problem-solving and so the evidence on which the refinement is based can be more rich. Results are provided for a real tablet formulation system, TFS, and experience is reported for two types of refinement tasks: debugging to correct faulty problem-solving of an early version of TFS; maintenance of TFS when the formulation task is altered by a change in company policy.