ENGEXP —an integrated environment for the development and application of expert systems in equipment and engine fault diagnosis and repair

Abstract

An integrated environment (ENGEXP) in PC Turbo Pascal for the development of machine fault diagnosis and repair expert systems is presented. The main components of ENGEXP are the user interface, the expert system core, the feedback and knowledge acquisition tool, and a help facility for the user. As usual, the expert system core contains the inference engine, the knowledge base(s) and the explanation subsystem. A particular feature of the inference engine is that it can resolve situations with multiple causes. The knowledge is organized into three layers as is done by the human experts. The qualitative analysis of the results obtained in a large sample of applications showed a remarkable performance, while the quantitative analysis showed a success rate over 95%. The response time is very good (always ⪕ 2 sec., in many cases ⪕ 0·5 sec.) despite the overhead caused by the user-friendly user interface.