ARCHITECTURAL ISSUES FOR EXPERT SYSTEMS IN REAL-TIME CONTROL

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in using expert system technology in the field of automatic control. We show that some particular requirements are imposed on the functionality and architecture of expert systems which shall support or extend conventional control systems. We discuss the necessity and the impacts of deep modeling, temporal reasoning and reason maintenance techniques from an architectural point of view. We argue for the utility of a separate mediating module, which tries to reduce the gap between the different knowledge levels of a conventional control system and an expert system. Furthermore, we show that it is highly valuable to have a distributed architecture such that the expert system and the mediating module consist of a set of parallel processes. The ideas developed in this paper are based on three years of experience in the German national venture TEX-I.