The software engineering of systems with expert components

Integrating expert system components into production software can be difficult because expert system development environments are typically incompatible with traditional software engineering technology. In an effort to deal with this problem, the authors are developing CEST, a C expert system toolset. CEST is a library of inference engines implemented as C functions callable from C programs, and a workbench of knowledge engineering support tools. CEST allows easy integration of expert system components into C-based software systems and provides knowledge-engineering support tools analogous to traditional software-engineering support tools.<>