Contemporary Systems and Cybernetics

Information Processing Model of Knowledge Systems Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists, Kaan Egilmez and Steven H. Kim, writing in Applied Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 5 No. 3, 1991, pp. 353–92, believe that to date, knowledge‐based systems (KBSs) have been developed on an ad‐hoc basis, without the benefit of quantitative tools for analysis and synthesis. They claim that to approach the field of knowledge engineering systematically, we must develop performance measures to characterize the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge systems, and thereby serve to highlight directions for improvement. They say that, when KBSs are applied to control tasks, real‐time performance becomes critical and in consequence the internal processes of knowledge‐based control systems (KBCS) must be optimized to fulfil real‐time requirements. In their contribution they derive relationships between information attributes and system performance.