ESCOM: An expert system for handling COTS mismatches

During the process of evaluating commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, it is inevitable to encounter many mismatches between our requirements and the existing COTS features. These mismatches occur as a result of an excess or shortage of COTS functionality. A domain expert should analyze these mismatches and decide how to handle them. However, domain experts are not always available. This paper firstly presents a formal model for the mismatch handling process as a decision making process. Then the paper proposes an expert system, called ESCOM, which may be used during the process of COTS evaluation to support making decisions about the encountered COTS mismatches. ESCOM captures the expertise of several domain experts and formulates it in the form of IF-THEN rules. An illustrative example is given at the end of the paper to demonstrate how the system works.