The correct answer is:
(d) Knowledge acquisition
Explanation:
In the context of expert systems, knowledge acquisition refers to the process of gathering, organizing, and formalizing the knowledge that the system needs to make decisions or solve problems. This is often considered a disadvantage because:
- Knowledge acquisition can be time-consuming, expensive, and complex. Experts may have difficulty articulating their knowledge in a way that can be easily encoded into a machine-readable format.
- It requires collaboration between domain experts and knowledge engineers, which can introduce errors, biases, or inconsistencies into the system.
While maintenance, development process, and fast prototyping also present challenges in expert systems, knowledge acquisition is generally regarded as one of the most significant difficulties due to the challenge of extracting tacit knowledge from human experts and structuring it for the system.