A TOOL SYSTEM FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASED ON-LINE DIAGNOSIS IN INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

Abstract

The use of knowledge-based techniques in real-time application is still a challenge. There are some special problems increasing in this kind of application: Handling of events to process new incoming data, the ability to perform several inferences in parallel, the ability to reason about time, etc. We present a tool system which supports the development of expert systems to be used in the field of industrial automation. The methods provided by the tool system support • the representation of temporal knowledge and reasoning about events in time, • the handling of asynchronous events, • the integration of knowledge-based components into conventional real-time software systems, and • the reasoning under time constraints. As a further part of the tool system, an expert system compiler with the ability to transform expert systems into a conventional procedural program (realized in C) is described. This method allows an efficient realization of knowledge-based components.