Merging test and verification for rule base debugging

Abstract

A way of formally but partially characterizing knowledge base correctness is to define knowledge base coherency. The first contribution of this paper is to show how taking into account test cases can lead to a new definition of rule base coherency that is better than existing ones. Our second contribution is that we propose extensions of model-based diagnosis that enable the complete characterization of rule base incoherencies and their possible causes. As a result, we obtain an algorithm for both debugging rule bases and detecting incoherencies.