A chaos based revitalization of large reliability knowledge bases

Abstract An interdependence among individual knowledge items makes any development of large reliability knowledge bases difficult. The key problem is to maintain a reasonable level of internal consistency in spite of heterogeneity of different knowledge items. A fairly general and efficient formal tools are presented in [1, 2]. They have been used for evaluation of an internal (in)consistency (represented e.g. by a level of chaos) of industrial knowledge bases. The only precondition for their application is an ability to distinguish between specific and general fuzzy items. A realistic case study (control valves) is presented in details.