Characteristics of Expert Systems

High performance: They should perform at the level of a human expert.

Adequate response time: They should have the ability to respond in a reasonable amount of
time. Time is crucial especially for real time systems.

Reliability: They must be reliable and should not crash.

Understandable: They should not be a black box instead it should be able explain the steps
of the reasoning process. It should justify its conclusions in the same way a human expert
explains why he arrived at particular conclusion.

Advantages of Expert Systems

Availability They are easily available due to mass production of software.
Less Production Cost Production cost is reasonable. This makes them affordable.

Speed They offer great speed. They reduce the amount of work an individual puts
in.

Less Error Rate Error rate is low as compared to human errors.

Reducing Risk They can work in the environment dangerous to humans.

Steady response They work steadily without getting motional, tensed or fatigued.

The knowledge acquisition process is usually comprised of three principal stages:

1.
Knowledge elicitation
is the interaction between the expert and the knowledge
engineer/program to elicit the expert knowledge in some systematic way.
2.
The knowledge thus obtained is usually stored in some form of human friendly
intermediate representation
.
3.
The intermediate representation of the knowledge is then compiled into an
executable form
(e.g. production rules) that the inference engine can process.
The iterative nature of the knowledge acquisition process can be represented in the
following diagram (from Jackson, Section 10.1):

he 5 main stages are:

1 IDENTIFICATION

Identifies the key problems. During this stage the knowledge engineer becomes aware of the
domain, sets goals and knows to select appropriate experts and other useful materials.

2 CONCEPTUALIZATION

This defines how the concepts and the relations among them are outlined and
related by the experts. / key concepts are operationalized and paper prototype
built

3 FORMALIZATION

Here the engineer maps or organises the tasks, relations and information into
formal representation./ paper prototype mapped onto some formal
representation and AI tools selected

4 IMPLEMENTATION

The obtained knowledge is implemented once its formalized. This involves

putting the knowledge rules into a structured form and a prototype is built to
test out the design. / formal representation rewritten for AI tools
5 TESTING

The system is tested for its efficiency, accuracy and also to see if its functioning properly.
This test is carried out on a small test problem or scenario.

check both "classic" test cases and "hard" boundary cases

most likely problems

I/O failures (user interface problems)

Logic errors (e.g. bad rules)

Control strategy problems