DEVELOPMENT OF A KBS FOR PERSONAL FINANCIAL-PLANNING GUIDED BY PRAGMATIC KADS

This paper outlines the structure and the results of a research project titled Development of a KBS for Personal Financial Planning Guided by Pragmatic KADS.(1) The aim of the project was the development of a prototype knowledge-based system for personal financial planning. The prototype system developed assists a potential private investor in selecting a professionally balanced mixture of investment products that meets all the investor's requirements with regard to the investment. As part of the specification, it was decided that the prototype is to develop a portfolio for a single client investing a one-off lump sum, assuming that the client's pension, insurance, and mortgage have been arranged and that no other prior investments need to be taken into account. The development of the prototype was guided by the Pragmatic KADS methodology, a streamlined version of KADS suitable to the development of small and medium-sized systems. The paper therefore describes how Pragmatic KADS helped to guide and structure the development of the prototype. The development process showed that the models that are developed as part of KADS knowledge analysis, which view knowledge from different viewpoints, contribute both to breaking down the complexity of the problem and to ensuring a comprehensive knowledge analysis. It also showed that the top-down approach of KADS has the inherent danger of neglecting some of the low-level knowledge that may have an impact on the high-level problem-solving strategies. This paper presents a way in which this problem can be resolved by using a modified version of the spiral approach to expert system development, guided by KADS.