Open Access

Rainer Perkuhn

• In the last years a common notion of a Problem-Solving Method (PSM) emerged from different knowledge engineering frameworks. As a generic description of the dynamic behaviour of knowledge based systems PSMs are favored subjects of reuse. Up to now, most investigations on the reuse of PSMs focus on static features and methods as objects of reuse. By this, they ignore a lot of information of how the PSM was developed that is, in principle, entailed in the different parts of a conceptual model of a PSM. In this paper the information of the different parts of PSMs is reconsidered from a reuse process point of view. A framework for generalized problem-solving methods is presented that describes the structure of a category of methods based on family resemblances. These generalized methods can be used to structure libraries of PSMs and - in the process of reuse - as a means to derive an incarnation, i.e. a member of its family of PSMs. For illustrating the ideas, the approach is applied to the task rsp. problem type of parametric design.