Facilitating Knowledge Acquisition Methodologies for a Knowledge-Based Decision Support System

This paper investigates the repertory grid technique as an approach for Knowledge Acquisition (KA) for the design and development of a knowledge-based system in educational domain. In order to obtain the significance of user requirements during the KA process in the concerned domain, the House of Quality (HOQ) concept, which is a central component of a popularly known method Quality Function Deployment (QFD), has been deployed in the current work. QFD is widely seen, being used for transforming user needs into a design pattern effectively. The basic requirement of a typical QFD is a grid of objectives (WHATs) and responses (HOWs). Here, in the context of the University system, the WAHTs are considered as various student requirements and the HOWs are the respective design modifications to be incorporated in the academic regulations. Such requirements will facilitate the knowledge acquisition for the University Curriculum System. In order to analyze the relationship of the concerned matrix, we have used the repertory grids technique for the knowledge acquisition process. Finally, integration of the repertory grids technique and quality function deployment is presented using MERGE (Multiple Experts Repertory Grids Elicsitation) theory. To show the usefulness of applying the repertory grids technique in quality function deployment, we have applied it in a realistic case illustration.