IDP-Z3: a reasoning engine for FO(.)

An important sign of intelligence is the capacity to apply a body of knowledge to a particular situation in order to not only derive new knowledge, but also to determine relevant questions or provide explanations. Developing interactive systems capable of performing such a variety of reasoning tasks for the benefits of its users has proved difficult, notably for performance and/or development cost reasons. Still, recently, a reasoning engine, called IDP3, has been used to build such systems, but it lacked support for arithmetic operations, seriously limiting its usefulness. We have developed a new reasoning engine, IDP-Z3, that removes this limitation, and we put it to the test in four knowledge-intensive industrial use cases. This paper describes FO(.) (aka FO-dot), the language used to represent knowledge in the IDP3 and IDP-Z3 system. It then describes the generic reasoning tasks that IDP-Z3 can perform, and how we used them to build a generic user interface, called the Interactive Consultant. Finally, it reports on the four use cases. In these four use cases, the interactive applications based on IDP-Z3 were capable of intelligent behavior of value to users, while having a low development cost (typically 10 days) and an acceptable response time (typically below 3 seconds). Performance could be further improved, in particular for problems on larger domains.