An Initial Step towards Developing And Using an Expert-System with a Business Simulation

"This paper describes an initial step that was taken to develop an expert-system to be used with a business simulation program. In view of the increasing importance of business simulation and its requirement for greater reality; and the emergence of AI technology, in particular expert-system technology; the question becomes not whether Al will have a place in simulation; but when and how. Rather than wait until the technology is more fully proven, we made a decision to develop a rule based expert-system application that would enable us to initiate some exploration of one aspect of AI without significant risk.-- We chose to develop an expert-system using a commercially available shell. Our objective was to: 1. Reduce the student time and frustration involved in mastering the Bryant Management Laboratory (BML) simulation. 2. Acquaint students with some aspects of the field of expert-systems. 3. Develop an expert-system base that could easily incorporate future simulation enhancements. 4. Gain some practical development experience with expert-systems. The current (Fall 1987) product is labeled “Trouble- Shooter.’ It will enable any student, with the appropriate disk operating on an IBM compatible PC, to determine why the BML simulation incorporated a seemingly “wrongdecision’ or produced a seemingly “wrong-result.