Expert system technology is receiving increasing popularity and acceptance in the engineering community. This is due to the fact that there actually exists a close match between the capabilities of the current generation expert systems and the requirements of engineering practice. Prepared by a distinguished team of experts, this book provides a balanced state-of-the-art presentation of the design principles of engineering expert systems, and a representative picture of their capabilities to assist efficiently the design, diagnosis and operation of complex industrial plants. Among the application areas covered are the following: hardware synthesis, industrial plant layout design, fault diagnosis, process control, image analysis, computer communication, electric power systems, intelligent control, robotics, and manufacturing systems. The book is appropriate for the researcher and the professional. The researcher can save considerable time in searching the scattered technical information on engineering expert systems. The professional can have readily available a rich set of guidelines and techniques that are applicable to a wide class of engineering domains.

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies and tools valuable for solving a wide spectrum of engineering problems. What's more, it offers these AI tools on an accompanying disk with easy-to-use software. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems for Engineers details the AI-based methodologies known as: Knowledge-Based Expert Systems (KBES); Design Synthesis; Design Critiquing; and Case-Based Reasoning. KBES are the most popular AI-based tools and have been successfully applied to planning, diagnosis, classification, monitoring, and design problems. Case studies are provided with problems in engineering design for better understanding of the problem-solving models using the four methodologies in an integrated software environment. Throughout the book, examples are given so that students and engineers can acquire skills in the use of AI-based methodologies for application to practical problems ranging from diagnosis to planning, design, and construction and manufacturing in various disciplines of engineering. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems for Engineers is a must-have reference for students, teachers, research scholars, and professionals working in the area of civil engineering design in particular and engineering design in general.

A comprehensive, integrated guide to engineering and manufacturing applications of expert systems.

This book is written for software engineers, software project leaders, and software managers who would like to introduce a new advanced software technology, expert systems, into their product. Expert system technology brings into programming a new dimension in which "rule of thumb" or heuristic expert knowledge is encoded in the program. In contrast to conventional procedural languages {e. g. , Fortran or C}, expert systems employ high-level programming languages {Le. , expert system shells} that enable us to capture the judgmental knowledge of experts such as geologists, doctors, lawyers, bankers, or insurance underwriters. Past expert systems have been more successfully applied in the problem areas of analysis and synthesis where the boundary of lo;nowledge is well defined and where experts are available and can be identified. Early successful applications include diagnosis systems such as MYCIN, geological systems such as PROSPECTOR, or design/configu ration systems such as XC ON. These early expert systems were mainly applicable to scientific and engineering problems, which are not theoreti cally well understood in terms of decisionmaking processes by their experts and which therefore require judgmental assessment. The more recent expert systems are being applied to sophisticated synthesis problems that involve a large number of choices, such as how the elements are to be compared. These problems normally entailed a large search space and slower speed for the expert systems designed. Examples of these systems include factory scheduling applications such as ISIS, or legal reasoning applications such as TAXMAN.

Expert Systems for Engineering Design presents the application of expert system methods to a variety of engineering design problems. This book provides the technical details on how the methods are used to solve specific design problems in chemical engineering, civil engineering, and several others. Organized into 12 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the synthesis, the creation, and development of alternative designs. This text then examines the nature of design expertise and the types of computer tools that can enhance the expert's decision-making. Other chapters consider the integration of tools into intelligent, cooperative frameworks. This book discusses as well the use of graphic interfaces with built-in knowledge about the designs being configured. The final chapter deals with the development of software tools for automatic design synthesis and evaluation within the integrated framework of a computer-aided mechanical design system known as CASE, which stands for computer-aided simultaneous engineering. This book is a valuable resource for engineers and architects.

Computer science textbook, computer programming, knowledge processing (data processing) - evaluation and design of expert systems. Bibliography, glossary, illustrations.