Ivo Vollrath

Case-based reasoning support for online catalog sales

Case-based reasoning uses similarity measures and domain-specific knowledge for information retrieval and problem solving. The paper considers how CBR techniques can be applied to e-commerce applications to enable intelligent sales support. It reviews the limitations of ordinary databases to this task and then examines CBR techniques that can improve the usefulness of electronic catalogs. It describes an implementation of a CBR-based system in a specific application domain, and concludes with brief descriptions of two projects at the University of Kaiserslautern that advance these systems.

Generalized Cases: Representation and Steps Towards Efficient Similarity Assessment

For certain application areas of case-based reasoning, the traditional view of cases as points in the problem-solution space is not appropriate. Motivated by a concrete application in the area of electronic design reuse, we introduce the concept of a generalized case that represents experience that naturally covers a space rather than a point. Within a formal framework we introduce the semantics of generalized cases and derive a canonical similarity measure for them. Generalized cases can be represented in a very flexible way by using constraints. This representation asks for new means of similarity assessment. We argue that in principle fuzzy constraint satisfaction or non-linear programming can be applied for similarity computation. However, to avoid the computational complexity of these approaches, we propose an algorithm for an efficient estimation of similarity for generalized cases.

IP Retrieval by Solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems

The increasing productivity gap implies the necessity to integrate reuse approaches in the circuit and system design. To install reuse approaches in the design flow, adapted database systems are needed for managing the reuse process, and especially for archiving and retrieving of intellectual properties (IPs). Our contribution is focused on the IP retrieval task. It builds upon two recent technologies for building knowledge-based systems: case-based reasoning and constraint satisfaction. For implementing this retrieval approach we develop a concept of an adapted database management system for archiving IP specifications utilizing a structured representation of relations between IP attributes.

Intelligent Electronic Catalogs for Sales Support

The number of electronic catalogs has grown rapidly during the past few years. Most of these catalogs use standard databases for storing and retrieving product information. Using ordinary databases for product catalogs, however, has the major drawback that it is often very difficult to find the products desired: very often, the database does not return a matching product at all or it returns many products that have to be examined manually. To overcome this problem, we propose the use of Case-Based Reasoning(CBR) techniques as an approach to requirement-oriented retrieval of products. CBR incorporates product knowledge into the database by means of a similarity measure. Recently, a number of commercial electronic catalogs based on CBR have been realized. We take a closer look at Analog Devices’ on-line catalog of operational amplifiers, which helps an engineer to find a suitable amplifier for her specific requirements.

Reuse of complex electronic designs

The concern of this paper is to lay the fundamentals for applying Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) techniques to the reuse of electronic designs. It describes the requirements of such an application from the CBR point of view. Possible solutions to problems that are new to CBR are proposed and a first working prototype is presented.