Rapid prototyping based on common substrate of knowledge

The authors describe the implementation of a specialized problem solver within the FAME system developed by J. Kastnec et al. (1986) and C. Apte et al., (1989). FAME is a knowledge-based system which provides financial marketing expertise. The authors present a very brief overview of the FAME system, with an emphasis on the general architecture of its knowledge bases and the philosophy underlying it. They then describe the implementation of a marketing incentives support service for FAME. This description illustrates the ease with which a fairly complex problem solver was readily implementable due to the availability of a common substrate of knowledge, and how the same substrate provided a mechanism for seamless sharing and communication between the newly added problem solver and other problem solvers that have already been implemented using FAME´s knowledge bases. The authors demonstrate some of the advantages of representing knowledge in an object centered style for developing a system with multiple problem solvers