Lessons learned from developing a mission-critical expert system with multiple experts through rapid prototyping

The expert systems technology is ubiquitous among the mission-critical tasks in the defense area. Knowledge compiled through the military applications can serve as a remarkable source of learning opportunities for those in the civilian sector. In this paper, we describe the process of developing one such mission-critical military application. which contains an embedded expert system. A large number of experts simultaneously participated in numerous knowledge acquisition sessions to provide their expertise in air combat planning. The rapid prototyping methodology was employed as a vehicle to facilitate the knowledge acquisition process. By recounting the development process, we intend to share the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons are presented from three different perspectives, i.e. the knowledge engineers, the experts, and regarding the rapid prototyping methodology. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.