EXPERT SYSTEMS - DIAGNOSING THE CAUSE OF PROBLEM AAS DATA

In analytical chemistry, expert systems are used to interpret experimental results and provide users with guidance in method selection and instrumental operation (26). We believe that expert systems can be very productive tools in the analytical laboratory. Because of the constraints involved in adding new knowledge to an expert system based on conventional language, we used an expert system shell to develop AAdiagnosis. We chose a rule-based shell that requires the chemical knowledge to be encoded in the form of case histories. AAdiagnosis treats symptoms and related causes as data. The symptoms are universal and together with the causes represent our experimental results. We have described three levels for encoding chemical knowledge: primary, secondary, and tertiary. The primary level of knowledge relates symptoms directly to causes; the secondary level relates symptoms to symptoms. The rules in AAdiagnosis, generated after compiling the secondary level of knowledge, relate symptoms. The tertiary level deals with situations in which one cause can give rise to more than one combination of symptoms. © 1992, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.