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Title: Building a prototype expert systems

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6993097

In the past few years expert system technology has been gaining increasing respect within the world of computer science as it offers practical solutions to problems which have previously defied computerization. This paper is the culmination of a years investigation into how LBL can practically make use of this technology to solve some of the problems being faced by its scientists. To establish this and gain a greater understanding of expert system technology we attempted to build a prototype expert system using a commercially available expert system shell. The application we chose was to troubleshoot the hardware of the TPC particle detector (used by high energy physicists at LBL) using Neuron Data's expert system shell, Nexpert. This paper gives some brief overviews of the theoretical and practical work done by other people in fields relevant to this project. It includes: expert systems, their development, diagnostic expert systems, and examples of expert systems built to troubleshoot electronic devices. We describe how we selected our prototype expert system and then how we went about designing and building it. For this we have detailed the knowledge necessary to start troubleshooting the TPC and the methods used to represent that knowledge within the expert system shell. Finally we discuss the understanding of expert system technology which we have gained during this project and why we believe that this technology has a place in the future of problem solving at LBL. 31 refs.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (USA)
DOE Contract Number:
AC03-76SF00098
OSTI ID:
6993097
Report Number(s):
LBL-25634; ON: DE88016665
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Portions of this document are illegible in microfiche products
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English