Chapter 4

Expert Systems

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4.1 What is an Expert System?

▪ Expert systems (ES) are one of the prominent research domains of AI. It is
introduced by the researchers at Stanford University, Computer Science Department.

▪ An Expert System is a computer program that is designed to solve complex problems in

a particular domain at the level of extra-ordinary human intelligence, expertise and to
provide decision-making ability like a human expert.

▪ It performs this by extracting knowledge from its knowledgebase (KB).

▪ Expert Systems are computer programs that exhibit intelligent behavior.

▪ They are concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolic inference or reasoning
by a computer, and how the knowledge used to make those inferences will be
represented.

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4.1 What is an Expert System?

▪ Achieving expert-level competence in solving problems in task areas by bringing to

bear a body of knowledge about specific tasks is called knowledge-based or expert
system.

▪ The term expert system is reserved for programs whose knowledgebase contains the
knowledge used by human experts. Expert systems and knowledge-based systems are
used synonymously.

▪ The area of human intellectual endeavor to be captured in an expert system is called

the task domain. Task refers to some goal-oriented, problem-solving activity. Domain
refers to the area within which the task is being performed.

▪ Typical tasks are diagnosis, planning, scheduling, configuration and design the
reasoning and inference rules according to the user queries.

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4.1 What is an Expert System?
▪ 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.

▪ It solves the most complex issue as an expert by extracting the knowledge

stored in its knowledgebase.

▪ The system helps in decision making for complex problems using both facts
and heuristics like a human expert.

▪ It is called so because it contains the expert knowledge of a specific domain

and can solve any complex problem of that particular domain.

▪ These systems are designed for a specific domain such as medicine, science
etc.

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4.1 What is an Expert System?
▪ The performance of an expert system is based on the expert's knowledge
stored in its knowledgebase (KB).

▪ The more knowledge stored in the KB, the more that system improves its
performance.

▪ One of the common examples of an ES is a suggestion of spelling errors

while typing in the Google search box.

▪ Building an expert system is known as knowledge engineering and its

practitioners are called knowledge engineers.

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4.1 What is an Expert System?
▪ The knowledge engineer must make sure that the computer has all the
knowledge needed to solve a problem.

▪ He should choose one or more forms in which to represent the required

knowledge as symbol patterns in the memory of the computer -- that is, he
(or she) must choose a knowledge representation.

▪ He must also ensure that the computer can use the knowledge efficiently by
selecting from a handful of reasoning methods. Every expert system
consists of two principal parts: the knowledgebase and the reasoning, or
inference engine.

▪ The knowledgebase of expert systems contains both factual and heuristic

knowledge.

▪ Factual knowledge is that knowledge of the task domain that is widely

shared, typically found in textbooks or journals, and commonly agreed upon
by those knowledgeable in the particular field.

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4.1 What is an Expert System?
▪ Heuristic knowledge is the less rigorous, more experiential, more judgmental
knowledge of performance.

▪ In contrast to factual knowledge, heuristic knowledge is rarely discussed,

and is largely individualistic.

▪ It is the knowledge of good practice, good judgment, and plausible reasoning

in the field. It is the knowledge that underlies the "art of good guessing."

▪ Below is the block diagram that represents the working (building blocks) of
an expert system:

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4.1 What is an Expert System?
Example of Expert System and Rule
IF … THEN Rules
Rule: Red_Light
IF the light is red (antecedent)
THEN stop (consequent)
Rule: Green_Light
IF the light is green
THEN go
Production Rules
the light is red ==> stop (left-hand side - antecedent)
(right-hand side - consequent)
the light is green ==> go

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4.2 Characteristics of Expert System
▪ High Performance: The expert system provides high performance for solving
any type of complex problem of a specific domain with high efficiency and
accuracy.

▪ Understandable: It responds in a way that can be easily understandable by

the user. It can take input in human language and provides the output in the
same way.

▪ Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate output.

▪ Highly responsive: ES provides the result for any complex query within a
very short period of time.

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4.3 Capabilities of Expert Systems
▪ Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of any domain from the
particular ES.

▪ Provide decision-making capabilities: It provides the capability of decision making in any

domain, such as for making any financial decision, decisions in medical science, etc.

▪ Demonstrate advice: It is capable of demonstrating any new products such as its features,
specifications, how to use that product, etc.

▪ Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.

▪ Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed description of an input problem.

▪ Interpreting the Input: It is capable of interpreting the input given by the user.

▪ Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.

▪ Diagnosis: An ES designed for the medical field is capable of diagnosing a disease without using
multiple components as it already contains various inbuilt medical tools.

▪ Instructing and assisting human in decision making

▪ Justifying the conclusion

▪ Suggesting alternative options to a problem

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They are incapable of:
▪ Substituting human decision makers

▪ Possessing human capabilities

▪ Producing accurate output for inadequate knowledgebase

▪ Refining their own knowledge

Note: It is important to remember that an expert system is not

used to replace the human experts. Instead, it is used to assist
the human in making a complex decision.

These systems do not have human capabilities of thinking and work

on the basis of the knowledgebase of the particular domain.

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Below are some popular examples of the Expert System:
▪ DENDRAL: It was an artificial intelligence project that was made as a chemical
analysis expert system. It was used in organic chemistry to detect unknown
organic molecules with the help of their mass spectra and knowledgebase of
chemistry.

▪ MYCIN: It was one of the earliest backward chaining expert systems that was
designed to find the bacteria causing infections like bacteraemia and meningitis.
It was also used for the recommendation of antibiotics and the diagnosis of blood
clotting diseases.

▪ PXDES: It is an expert system that is used to determine the type and level of
lung cancer. To determine the disease, it takes a picture from the upper body,
which looks like the shadow. This shadow identifies the type and degree of harm.

▪ CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system that can
detect cancer at early stages

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4.4 Components of Expert System
1. User Interface: 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. Does the interaction
task with end users.

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4.4 Components of Expert System
2. Inference Engine (Rules of Engine): The inference engine is
known as the brain of the expert system as it is the main
processing unit of the system.

▪ It applies inference rules to the knowledgebase to derive a

conclusion or deduce new information.

▪ It helps in deriving an error-free solution for queries asked by the

user.

▪ With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the

knowledge from the knowledgebase. So, it is A mechanism to
derive new knowledge from the knowledgebase and the information
provided by the userOften based on the use of rules

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 4.4 Components of Expert System
There are two types of inference engines:

1. Deterministic Inference Engine: The conclusions drawn from this type of inference engine
are assumed to be true. It is based on facts and rules.

2. Probabilistic Inference Engine: This type of inference engine contains uncertainty in

conclusions and based on the probability.

Inference engine uses the following modes to derive the solutions

▪ Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and applies the inference rules to
add their conclusion to the known facts.

▪ Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts from the goal and works
backward to prove the known facts.

The Good and Bad of these Chaining

▪ Forward chaining allows you to conclude anything

▪ Forward chaining is expensive

▪ Backward chaining requires known goals.

▪ Premises of backward chaining directs which facts (tests) are needed.

▪ Rule trace provides explanation.

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4.4 Components of Expert System
3. Knowledgebase: 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 knowledgebase, the more precise will be the Expert System.

▪ It contains essential information about the problem domain. It is similar to a database

that contains information and rules of a particular domain or subject.

▪ Often represented as facts and rules

▪ One can also view the knowledgebase as collections of objects and their attributes.
Such as a Lion is an object and its attributes are it is a mammal, it is not a domestic
animal, etc.

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Components of Knowledgebase
▪ 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.

▪ Knowledge Representation: It is used to formalize the knowledge stored in

the knowledgebase using the If-else rules.

▪ Knowledge Acquisitions: It is the process of extracting, organizing, and

structuring the domain knowledge, specifying the rules to acquire the
knowledge from various experts, and store that knowledge into the
knowledgebase.

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Components of Knowledgebase

Figure-2: Interactions in Expert Systems

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Development of Expert Systems
▪ Here, we will explain the working of an expert system by taking an
example of MYCINES. Below are some steps to build a MYCIN:

▪ Firstly, ES should be fed with expert knowledge. In the case of

MYCIN, human experts specialized in the medical field of bacterial
infection, provide information about the causes, symptoms, and other
knowledge in that domain.

▪ The KB of the MYCIN is updated successfully. In order to test it, the

doctor provides a new problem to it. The problem is to identify the
presence of the bacteria by inputting the details of a patient, including
the symptoms, current condition, and medical history.

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Development of Expert Systems
▪ The ES will need a questionnaire to be filled by the patient to know
the general information about the patient such as gender, age, etc.

▪ Now the system has collected all the information, so it will find the
solution for the problem by applying if-then rules using the inference
engine and using the facts stored within the KB.

▪ In the end, it will provide a response to the patient by using the user
interface.

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Participants in the development of an Expert System
There are three primary participants in the building of Expert System:

▪ Expert: The success of an ES much depends on the knowledge provided by

human experts. These experts are those persons who are specialized in
that specific domain.

▪ Knowledge Engineer: Knowledge engineer is the person who gathers the

knowledge from the domain experts and then codifies that knowledge to
the system according to the formalism.

▪ End-User: This is a particular person or a group of people who may not be

experts, and working on the expert system needs the solution or advice for
his queries, which are complex.

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4.5 Why Expert System?
Before using any technology, we must have an idea about why to use that
technology and hence the same for the ES. Although we have human experts in
every field, then what is the need to develop a computer-based system? So below
are the points that are describing the need of the ES:

▪ No memory Limitations: It can store as much data as required and can memorize
it at the time of its application. But for human experts, there are some
limitations to memorize all things at every time.

▪ High Efficiency: If the knowledgebase is updated with the correct knowledge,

then it provides a highly efficient output, which may not be possible for a human.

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4.5 Why Expert System?
▪ Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each domain, and they all
have different experiences, and different skills, so it is not easy to get a final
output for the query. But if we put the knowledge gained from human experts into
the expert system, then it provides an efficient output by mixing all the facts and
knowledge

▪ Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by human emotions such
as fatigue, anger, depression, anxiety, etc.. Hence the performance remains
constant.

▪ High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any query.

▪ Considers all the facts: To respond to any query, it checks and considers all the
available facts and provides the result accordingly. But it is possible that a human
expert may not consider some facts due to any reason.

▪ Regular updates improve the performance: If there is an issue in the result

provided by the expert systems, we can improve the performance of the system by
updating the knowledge base.

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Advantages of Expert Systems
▪ These systems are highly reproducible.

▪ They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not safe.

▪ Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.

▪ The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not affected

by emotions, tension, or fatigue.

▪ They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

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Limitations of Expert Systems
▪ The response of the expert system may get wrong if the
knowledgebase 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.

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Applications of Expert Systems
▪ In designing and manufacturing domain: It can be broadly used for
designing and manufacturing physical devices such as camera lenses and
automobiles.
▪ In the knowledge domain: These systems are primarily used for publishing
the relevant knowledge to the users
▪ In the finance domain: In the finance industries, it is used to detect any
type of possible fraud, suspicious activity, and advise bankers that if they
should provide loans for business or not.
▪ In the diagnosis and troubleshooting of devices: In medical diagnosis, the
ES system is used, and it was the first area where these systems were
used.
▪ Planning and Scheduling: The expert systems can also be used for planning
and scheduling some particular tasks for achieving the goal of that task.

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When Not to Use Expert Systems
Expert systems are not suitable for all types of domains and tasks. They
are not useful or preferable, when …

▪ Efficient conventional algorithms are known

▪ The main challenge is computation but not knowledge

▪ Knowledge cannot be captured efficiently or used effectively

▪ Users are reluctant to apply an expert system, e.g. due to criticality of

task, high risk or high security demands

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Expert Systems: Summary
Expert systems or knowledge-based systems are used to represent and
process knowledge in a format that is suitable for computers but still
understandable by humans. If-Then rules are a popular format

▪ The main components of an expert system are Knowledgebase and

Inference Engine.

▪ Expert Systems can be cheaper, faster, more accessible and more reliable
than humans.

▪ Expert Systems have limited knowledge (especially “common-sense”), can be

difficult and expensive to develop, and users may not trust them for critical
decisions

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End

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