The lack of well-tried and reliable knowledge engineering techniques has been a limiting factor in the development of expert systems. The initial successes of early systems resulted in too much emphasis being placed upon the bottom-up strategy for knowledge acquisition. At the present time the technology used for implementing knowledge based systems tends to exert too great an influence on the acquisition process itself. There is an urgent need for better tools to aid the knowledge acquisition process. In the process control area we need better tools for creating models of the process and relating these to operator actions and cognitive processes. There is also a need for tools to assist in validating expert systems since progress will almost certainly be limited by safety considerations.

Inspec keywords: process control; safety; expert systems; cognitive systems; knowledge acquisition

Other keywords: knowledge engineering tool; cognitive process; knowledge acquisition; knowledge based system; process control; expert system validation; safety

Subjects: Control engineering computing