A FRACTAL ANALYSIS OF SYMBOLIC AND FUZZY KNOWLEDGE AND ITS ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

Fractal analysis has been used for the study of chaos in a number of static and dynamic systems. The difficulty in applying fractal analysis to symbolic knowledge bases lies in finding a generic notion of scale. The only precondition for the application of fractal analysis is an ability to distinguish between specific and general knowledge items. An analogy with water flow through a pipe network which is topologically identical to the reasoning path under study is used to solve the problem. The main advantages of this methodology are its information non-intensity, simplicity and ability to absorb commonsense heuristics. Therefore it can be easily put to practical use. Two case studies (symbolic/fault tree, fuzzy/ball bearing) are given.