Design and implementation of an expert system for periodic and emergency control under uncertainty: A case study of city gate stations

Abstract

Safety analysis is essential in the natural gas transmission industry to guarantee effective hazard identification and to prevent the failure of components in advance. The overall aim of this research is to introduce a new hybrid expert system and fuzzy logic to monitor city gate stations as one of the most vital installations of gas distribution networks. The proposed model utilizes fuzzy if-then rules based on multiple experts' opinions to study the compound interrelations between the mechanical and physical elements of city gate stations. The presented expert system accounts for uncertainty associated with the experts’ judgments by fuzzy sets theory. The expert system is implemented in an object-oriented platform and is programmed with C#. The validity of the expert system is confirmed using simulation experiments through a case study of city gate stations.