Figure 2: ESDS
The methodology for establishing
ment environment as a soft system which can be characterised by the following components:
Objectwe: The ESDS aims at developing expert systems which can satisfy require- ments of relevant parties and the environ- mental constraints. More important, the ESDS should have the capacity to handle uncertainty and changes.
Components The components of the ESDS can be divided into three categories: hu- man resources, computing resources, and processed elements. Human resources in- clude software developer, domain experts, users and the system owner. Computing re- sources include software tools and hardware equipment. Processed elements are those related to human knowledge, information and decisions.
Connectivzty: The components which make up the ESDS form a degree of connectiv- ity. They are more closely connected to each other than the components outside the ESDS. The connectivity indicates the infor- mation flow and operation sequence among different system components.
Subsystems: The subsystem of the ESDS may be defined according to the main func- tions of the whole development process. Some commonly accepted subsystems of the ESDS include knowledge engineering subsystem, system development subsystem, and system acceptance subsystem. The
connectivity of the system implies that, the subsystems may have boundaries, across which will be flows of information. and per- haps resources. A more important property is that t.he activities of the system are acti- vated within the boundaries of the subsys- tems.