The HeKatE methodology. Hybrid engineering of intelligent systems: This paper describes a new approach, the HeKatE methodology, to the design and development of complex rule-based systems for control and decision support. The main paradigm for rule representation, namely, eXtended Tabular Trees (XTT), ensures high density and transparency of visual knowledge representation. Contrary to traditional, flat rule-based systems, the XTT approach is focused on groups of similar rules rather than on single rules. Such groups form decision tables which are connected into a network for inference. Efficient inference is assured as only the rules necessary for achieving the goal, identified by the context of inference and partial order among tables, are fired. In the paper a new version of the language—XTT2²—is presented. It is based on ALSV(FD) logic, also described in the paper. Another distinctive feature of the presented approach is a top-down design methodology based on successive refinement of the project. It starts with Attribute Relationship Diagram (ARD) development. Such a diagram represents relationships between system variables. Based on the ARD scheme, XTT tables and links between them are generated. The tables are filled with expert-provided constraints on values of the attributes. The code for rule representation is generated in a humanreadable representation called HMR and interpreted with a provided inference engine called HeaRT. A set of software tools supporting the visual design and development stages is described in brief.

Comparison, rating, and ranking of alternative solutions, in case of multicriteria evaluations, have been an eternal focus of operations research and optimization theory. There exist numerous approaches at practical solving the multicriteria ranking problem. The recent focus of interest in this domain was the event of parametric evaluation of research entities in Poland. The principal methodology was based on pairwise comparisons. For each single comparison, four criteria have been used. One of the controversial points of the assumed approach was that the weights of these criteria were arbitrary. The main focus of this study is to put forward a theoretically justified way of extracting weights from the opinions of domain experts. Theoretical bases for the whole procedure are based on a survey and its experimental results. Discussion and comparison of the two resulting sets of weights and the computed inconsistency indicator are discussed.