ACE: Going from prototype to product with an expert system

ACE (Automated Cable Expertise) is a knowledge-based expert system that provides trouble-shooting and diagnostic reports for telephone company managers. Its application domain is telephone cable maintenance. ACE departs from standard expert system architecture in that a separate data base system is used as its primary source of information. ACE designers were influenced by the R1/XCON project, and ACE uses techniques similar to those of R1/XCON. This paper reports the progress of ACE as it moves out of experimentation and into a live software environment, and characterizes it in terms of current expert system technology.