Expert system

Expert System
 An expert system is a computer program that is designed to solve complex
problems and to provide decision-making ability like a human expert.

 It performs this by extracting knowledge from its knowledge base using the
reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.

 The expert system is a part of AI, and the first ES was developed in the year
1970, which was the first successful approach of artificial intelligence.
 Components of Expert System

An expert system mainly consists of four components:

1. User Interface
2. Inference Engine
3. knowledge acquisition system
4. Knowledge Base
 1:User Interface

 This is the part of the expert system that end users interact with to get an
answer to their question or problem.
 With the help of a user interface, the expert system interacts with the user,
takes queries as an input in a readable format, and passes it to the inference
engine.
 After getting the response from the inference engine, it displays the output
to the user. In other words, it is an interface that helps a non-expert user
to communicate with the expert system to find a solution.
 2:Inference Engine

 The inference engine is known as the brain of the expert system as it is the
main processing unit of the system.
 With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from
the knowledge base.
 Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of
inference engine are assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.
 Probabilistic Inference engine: This type of inference engine contains
uncertainty in conclusions, and based on the probability.
 strategies of Inference Engine
1. Forward Chaining: It is a strategy of an expert system to answer the
question, “What can happen next?” It starts from the known facts and
rules.
For example, prediction of share market status as an effect of changes in
interest rates.
2. Backward Chaining: With this strategy, an expert system finds out the
answer to the question, “Why this happened?” It is a backward reasoning
method that starts from the goal and works backward to prove the known
facts.
For example, diagnosis of blood cancer in humans. OR Troubleshooting
complex technical issues in hardware and software systems.
 Knowledge Base

 The knowledgebase is a type of storage that stores knowledge acquired

from the different experts of the particular domain.
 It is considered as big storage of knowledge. The more the knowledge
base, the more precise will be the Expert System.
• Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and accepted
by knowledge engineers comes under factual knowledge.
• Heuristic Knowledge: This knowledge is based on practice, the ability to
guess, evaluation, and experiences.
 Medical diagnosis

 CaDet (Cancer Decision Support Tool) is

used to identify cancer in its earliest stages.
 DENDRAL helps chemists identify
unknown organic molecules.
 DXplain is a clinical support system that
diagnoses various diseases.
Expert system within self diagnosis web
sites
Financial Analysis: XCON is an expert system
Engineering Design: R1 is an expert system It uses a knowledge base of
engineering principles and customer requirements to generate optimal designs
for each customer.
Legal Advice: LEX is an expert system that was developed to assist lawyers
in the analysis of legal cases.
Troubleshooting: PROTÉGÉ is an expert system developed to assist
engineers in diagnosing and fixing problems in complex systems.
 Chess games
 Chess computer games are considered expert
system because the games copies and expert
human player.
 The chess games have a knowledge base which
contain different possible movies and
strategies.
 When the human player makes a move, the
computer would respond by checking the
knowledge base for best possible counter
 Locating minerals and oil reserves

Expert system can be used to figure out

likely locations to find new reserves of
minerals, oil, and gas.
The expert system knowledge base contains
geological information such as rock formation
that could contain oil, minerals and gas.
The expert system would advise on the
chances of finding the oil, gas.
 Car fault diagnosis

 Modern cars are complex and when they go

wrong it can be difficult for mechanics and
engineers to know exactly what the problem is.
 Car manufacturers create expert system which
contain lots of information about their car in
knowledge base.
 The expert system guide the mechanics through
different tests until the exact problems can be
found.
 Applications of expert systems
 Information management
 Hospitals and medical facilities
 Employee performance evaluation
 Loan analysis
 Virus detection
 Useful for repair and maintenance projects
 Warehouse optimization
 Planning and scheduling
 Stock market trading
 Capabilities of the Expert System
Below are some capabilities of an Expert System

 Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities

 Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
 Diagnosis: Capable of diagnosing a disease without using multiple
components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.
 Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any
domain from the particular ES.
 Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description
of an input problem
 Advantages of Expert System

 It improves the decision quality

 It provides fast and efficient solutions to problems in a narrow area of
specialization.
 Helps you to get fast and accurate answers
 A proper explanation of decision making
 Ability to solve complex and challenging issues
 Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
 Limitations of Expert System

 The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge base
contains the wrong information.
 Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for different
scenarios.
 Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
 Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
 For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big
limitations.
 It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.