Interactive constraint satisfaction for office systems

Abstract

This paper presents an interactive constraint satisfaction mechanism for building office systems. We noticed that regulations for business are primarily described in declarative constraints, and clerical work could be regarded as consistency maintenance governed by conformance to the regulations in terms of the data in business databases and application forms. From this view point, we model clerical work as a consistency maintenance model. On the basis of the model, we develop a constraint syntax and an interactive constraint satisfaction system appropriate to clerical work. In order to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our method, we rewrote the general affairs expert system KOA, an office system currently in operation, using constraints, and evaluated the resulting performance. Experimental results show that all the regulations can be easily described in constraints, the description size is reduced by 50%. The constraints have high modularity and cover rare cases exhaustively, the response time is short enough to be feasible, and the number of interactions is almost equivalent to that of the original system. The results confirm the important point that we can easily realize a maintainable office system with the interactive constraint satisfaction mechanism without increasing the number of interactions.<>