Common Sense Reasoning in Diagnostic Systems - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 101

 The analogy for solving problems assumes the application of reasoning by analogy for
increasing the efficiency of the problem solution which, generally speaking, can be
solved without analogy as well as e.g., in programming and proving theorems;
 The analogy for prediction (forecasting) uses reasoning by analogy for obtaining new facts.
Due to the transformation of knowledge based on the likeness of objects, one can make
the conclusion that new facts probably hold.
Depending on the nature of information transferred from an object of analogy to the other
one, the analogy of properties and the analogy of relations can be distinguished:
 The analogy of properties considers two single objects or a pair of sets (classes) of
homogeneous objects, and the transferred attributes are the properties of these objects,
for example, analogy between illness symptoms of two persons or analogy in the
structure of the surfaces of Earth and Mars, etc.;
 The analogy of relations considers pairs of objects where the objects can be absolutely
different and the transferred attributes are properties of these relations. For example,
using the analogy of relations, bionics studies processes in nature in order to use the
obtained knowledge in a modern technology.
We consider the methods of solution search on the basis of structural analogy which allows
to take into account a context and based on the theory of structural mapping. We use
semantic networks as a model of knowledge representation.

2.1 Reasoning by structural analogy taking into account the context
Consider an analogy as a quadruple A = < O , C , R , p > , where O and R are the source object
and the receiver object and C is the intersection object, i.e., the object that structurally is
intersected with the source object and receiver object, and has a larger cardinality of the set
of properties in the comparison with these objects. In other words, the analogy between the
source object and receiver object is considered in the context of the intersection C , and p is a
property for the definition of an original context. The structure of this analogy is represented
in Fig. 2.

O R

С

p

Fig. 2. Structure of analogy using the context

We use semantic networks (SNs) as a model of the knowledge representation for reasoning
by analogy. The choice of an SN for the knowledge representation possesses an important
advantage, which distinguishes it from other models, such as natural representation of
structural information and fairly simple updating in a relatively homogenous environment.
The latter property is very important for real-time IDSS oriented towards open and
dynamical problem domains.