Affiliations: Siemens AG Österreich, Vienna, Austria. E-mails: {andreas.a.falkner, alois.haselboeck}@siemens.com
Note: [] Corresponding author: Andreas Falkner, Siemens AG Österreich, CT RTC BAM CON, Siemens str. 90, 1210 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: andreas.a.falkner@siemens.com
Abstract: As knowledge changes over time, its representation in knowledge-based systems along with the existing instances (e.g., configured products, schedules, plans, documents, web sites, etc.) must be changed, too. This paper enumerates some of the most important challenges which arise in practice when changing a knowledge base: redesign of the knowledge base, schema evolution of the data bases, upgrade of configuration instances, adaptation of solver, UI, I/O and test suites. Partially, there are research theories for some of these challenges, but only few of them are already available in tools and frameworks. We cannot provide solutions here, but we want to stimulate research in knowledge evolution with a representative set of industrial challenges. Product configuration is a prominent case where the use of knowledge-based AI technologies has been well established over the last years. We use a self-contained real-world example from the field of configuration to describe the challenges.
