The
Swedish Board for Industrial Development's
HEUREKA System
The Swedish Board for Industrial Development, together with
consultants from NovaCast AB, used XpertRule to develop HEUREKA,
an Expert System for evaluating product ideas.
In common with many forward thinking countries, the Swedish Government
offers support to people who come up with product ideas and innovations,
even though only a small percentage of these ideas ever become successful
ventures. According to the Swedish Board for Industrial Development
(STU & SIND), their research showed that as few as 2.5% of ideas
came to fruition.
With a finite amount of funds, government institutions and sponsoring
organizations such as the STU & SIND have experts with the specialised
knowledge needed to choose the best projects for funding. However,
this expertise is not documented or structured and only available
from a few senior consultants. The overload of applications was
causing the STU & SIND several problems including inconsistent
assessment of ideas, a high failure rate among ideas chosen for
funding and processing delays.
The STU & SIND wanted to automate initial project evaluations
in order to improve their service, but trials using scoring techniques,
patterns etc., did not result in a workable system. They then sought
cooperation from NovaCast AB to look into the development of an
expert system to capture and apply the experience of their senior
consultants.
The first problem they faced was how to capture the expertise.
Although the consultants were able to provide accurate assessments
of product ideas, they found it difficult to formalise the rules
and logic which they were applying.
To overcome this, NovaCast decided to use XpertRule, an expert
system tool produced by XpertRule Software in the UK. As a first step
five independent viewpoints of assessing a product idea were identified
as a basic structure.
- the applicant
- the product
- the market
- the financial potential of the product
- the conformity to STU & SIND policy
For each viewpoint, the list of attributes or factors affecting
the assessment were identified. When developing the rules for each
viewpoint, two particular knowledge acquisition techniques of XpertRule
were found to be most useful. Firstly the "Truth Table"
method, whereby XpertRule generated all the possible combinations
for the attributes of a viewpoint. The experts then identified the
correct outcome for each individual case.
Secondly, using the "Iterative Induction" technique,
the experts could give a few examples of decision making using basic
attributes from which an initial decision tree was "induced".
By inspecting this tree, a need for further examples and/or attributes
would be suggested and the process continued until the experts were
satisfied with the quality of the resulting decision tree. This
second technique was found to be invaluable in viewpoints where
the experts found it most difficult to formalise their knowledge.
Mr Lennart Sandberg, the projects manager at SIND sees the advantages
of HEUREKA as:
- Giving their specialists more time to concentrate on the potentially successful ideas.
- Gives more homogeneous and fair assessments.
- Applies agency policies consistently.
- Gives fewer failed endeavours.
- Best utilisation of personnel and finance.
- Speedier processing.
HEUREKA is now used in over 20 STU & SIND local government
offices throughout Sweden.
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