Knowledge refinement to debug and maintain a tablet formulation system

Knowledge refinement tools have commonly been applied to diagnostic applications. The 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