An expert system approach to malfunction diagnosis in chemical plants

Abstract An efficient knowledge-based system approach to malfunction diagnosis in chemical processing plants is discussed. The approach involves a hierarchical diagnostic structure in which the nodes represent specific malfunction hypotheses. Instead of being a static collection of knowledge, the hierarchy is a collection of small individual specialists coordinated to arrive at an overall di Each specialist contains compiled and qualitative domain knowledge for evaluating the malfunction hypothesis. This malfunction hierarchy is particularly effective in handling multiple symptom and multiple malfunction situations. Conclusions are based on a working prototype system which has been built and tested to demonstrate the computational methodology.