Suggesting causes of faults in data-driven rule-based systems

As part of developing the CLIPS-based debugging tool MIRO, and because there has been relatively little exploration of the debugging process for such programs, the problems of debugging data-driven rule-based programs in general are defined and analyzed. How explanation can be used as a tool to ease the debugging process is discussed, and how it can suggest causes of faults in answer to questions asking why a particular fault occurred is examined. An algorithm that provides part of the explanation for a rule's failure to fire is discussed