Expert System Environment for Fluid Power Achievements and Challenges

Among all AI (Artificial Intelligence) areas, Expert System has shown to be one of the most practical applications. This area has contributed with successful projects for both, academia and business fields (Lyons, 98). Despite its great use in several areas, the application of AI techniques is almost unknown in the fluid power domain. Perhaps this is due to the fact that to develop an expert system, the knowledge engineer, namely the system developer, has to convince the domain experts of the system technical feasibility, as well as of its financial return. Based on a research project extensively demonstrated at key events (Silva 2000a; Silva 2000b), the paper presents aspects related to an expert system applied to fluid power, whose knowledge framework representation combines rules, object-oriented modeling and semantic network. The project involved intensive interaction with fluid power experts, from academia and industry, as well as application of Internet technology for knowledge representation, validation and storing.