An Expert System for Landfill Leachate Management

Abstract

A prototype expert system, called the Leachate Management Advisor (LMA), has been developed to assist in the conceptual design of leachate management facilities in a sanitary landfill. The expert system aims to establish the expected leachate production and its polluting potential, recommend a policy for leachate containment, investigate whether lining, leachate collection or treatment is/are necessary, and, if so, perform conceptual design for the required components. An expert system shell, Kappa-PC, was selected as the development tool for the LMA prototype because of its object-oriented approach, which combines the two main knowledge representation techniques for expert systems, i.e. production rules and objects. An object-oriented model of the domain was successfully developed where the rule-based reasonings and other decision processes operate on or across objects representing real-world entities of the domain. Expertise in the knowledge base was acquired from 12 textual sources and 10 landfill practitioners in Malaysia. The overall performance of the LMA was evaluated to be satisfactory based on a case study of an actual landfill site.