Problem solving methods (PSMs) are software components that represent and encode reusable algorithms. They can be combined with representations of domain knowledge to produce intelligent application systems. A goal of research on PSMs is to provide principled methods and tools for composing and reusing algorithms in knowledge-based systems. The ultimate objective is to produce libraries of methods that can be easily adapted for use in these systems. Despite the intuitive appeal of PSMs as conceptual building blocks, in practice, these goals are largely unmet. There are no widely available tools for building applications using PSMs and no public libraries of PSMs available for reuse. This paper analyzes some of the reasons for the lack of widespread adoptions of PSM techniques and illustrate our analysis by describing our experiences developing a complex, high-throughput software system based on PSM principles. We conclude that many fundamental principles in PSM research are useful for building knowledge-based systems. In particular, the task-method decomposition process, which provides a means for structuring knowledge-based tasks, is a powerful abstraction for building systems of analytic methods. However, despite the power of PSMs in the conceptual modeling of knowledge-based systems, software engineering challenges have been seriously underestimated. The complexity of integrating control knowledge modeled by developers using PSMs with the domain knowledge that they model using ontologies creates a barrier to widespread use of PSM-based systems. Nevertheless, the surge of recent interest in ontologies has led to the production of comprehensive domain ontologies and of robust ontology-authoring tools. These developments present new opportunities to leverage the PSM approach.

中文翻译：

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构建和部署可重用问题解决器的软件工程挑战。


问题解决方法 (PSM) 是表示和编码可重用算法的软件组件。它们可以与领域知识的表示相结合来生成智能应用系统。 PSM 研究的一个目标是为在基于知识的系统中编写和重用算法提供原则性的方法和工具。最终目标是产生可以轻松适应在这些系统中使用的方法库。尽管 PSM 作为概念构建块具有直观的吸引力，但在实践中，这些目标在很大程度上未能实现。没有广泛可用的工具来使用 PSM 构建应用程序，也没有可供重用的 PSM 公共库。本文分析了 PSM 技术未得到广泛采用的一些原因，并通过描述我们开发基于 PSM 原理的复杂、高吞吐量软件系统的经验来说明我们的分析。我们的结论是，PSM 研究中的许多基本原理对于构建基于知识的系统很有用。特别是，任务方法分解过程提供了一种构建基于知识的任务的方法，是构建分析方法系统的强大抽象。然而，尽管 PSM 在基于知识的系统的概念建模中具有强大的功能，但软件工程的挑战却被严重低估了。将开发人员使用 PSM 建模的控制知识与他们使用本体建模的领域知识相集成的复杂性为基于 PSM 的系统的广泛使用造成了障碍。然而，最近对本体论兴趣的激增导致了全面的领域本体论和强大的本体论创作工具的产生。 这些发展为利用 PSM 方法提供了新的机会。