Introduction

• Product support is everything needed to support the continued use of a product
• Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals
• Intelligent Product Manuals
• Electronic Performance Support Systems

• Each user query can be represented as a problem

• A problem solving approach can be used throughout the development of a product support system

Background

• Problem solving and reasoning techniques
• Case-based reasoning: Reuse and modify parts of previous solutions, represent specific knowledge
• Model-based reasoning: Reuse previous solutions, capture general knowledge
• Rule-based reasoning: Follows an iterative cycle, series of progrssive inferences, represent specific knowledge
• Reasoning in product support
• Rule-based reasoning is the most common for troubleshooting
• Case-based reasoning used in diagnosis and help-desk applications
• Model-based reasoning less used technique, employed in adaptive interfaces
• The inference mechanism needs to be studied in a structured manner and the advantages of different reasoning techniques can be exploited within the same system

Problem solving approach

• Process starts with problem identification/recognition, deciding the course of actions that should be followed and reach a product support solution, which is delivered as a document
• Documents are constructed from Information Objects and Information Object Clusters
• Information Object: A data structure that represents an identifiable and meaningful instance of information in a specific presentation form
• Information Object Cluster: A set of Information Objects, which share a common property and are arranged in a structure S
• Document: A set of Information Object Clusters logically structured.

Problem solving approach-2

• Problem characterisation: Two main factors are the domain and environment of the system
• Domain: Products and tasks supported
• Environment: User, location, time, purpose
• Product Support Problem is a 4-tuple PSP := (MOD, HYP, CON, OBS)
• MOD represents the domain knowledge
• HYP is a finite set of combinations of MOD (hypotheses)
• CON stands for the knowledge about the application environment
• OBS is a finite set of observations from the query
• A hypothesis can be a Product Support Solution only if when combined with MOD and CON can infer OBS or a subset of OBS

Problem solving approach-3

• Knowledge reuse for previously solved problems
• Case-based reasoning
• Knowledge adaptation for similar problems
• Case-based reasoning
• Knowledge creation for new problems
• Case-based reasoning and model-based reasoning

Problem solving approach-4

Implementation

Conclusions and future work

• The approach presented segments the development phase of the system's inference mechanism into small manageable steps
• According to the product support problems different reasoning strategies are utilised
• Multi-modal reasoning enables the system to respond to a large variety of user queries
• A co-relation between problem solving and product support has been identified
• The problem solving strategy can be integrated with knowledge models to provide a product support knowledge engineering framework