Executive Summary:

A computer program that uses artificial intelligence to solve problems within a specialized
domain that ordinarily requires human expertise. The first expert system was developed in
1965 by Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Ladenburg of Stanford University in California,
U.S. Dendral, as their expert system was later known, was designed to analyze chemical
compounds. Expert systems now have commercial applications in fields as diverse as
medical diagnosis, petroleum engineering, and financial investing. In order to accomplish
feats of apparent intelligence, an expert system relies on two components: a knowledge base
and an inference engine. A knowledge base is an organized collection of facts about the
system's domain. An inference engine interprets and evaluates the facts in the knowledge
base in order to provide an answer. Typical tasks for expert systems involve classification,
diagnosis, monitoring, design, scheduling, and planning for specialized endeavors.
Facts for a knowledge base must be acquired from human experts through interviews and
observations. This knowledge is then usually represented in the form of “if-then” rules
(production rules): “If some condition is true, then the following inference can be made (or
some action taken).” The knowledge base of a major expert system includes thousands of
rules. A probability factor is often attached to the conclusion of each production rule, because
the conclusion is not a certainty. For example, a system for the diagnosis of eye diseases
might indicate, based on information supplied to it, a 90 percent probability that a person has
glaucoma, and it might also list conclusions with lower probabilities. An expert system may
display the sequence of rules through which it arrived at its conclusion; tracing this flow
helps the user to appraise the credibility of its recommendation and is useful as a learning tool
for students. Human experts frequently employ heuristic rules, or
“rules of thumb,” in addition to simple production rules. For example, a credit manager might
know that an applicant with a poor credit history, but a clean record since acquiring a new
job, might actually be a good credit risk. Expert systems have incorporated such heuristic
rules and increasingly have the ability to learn from experience. Nevertheless, expert
systems remain supplements, rather than replacements, for human experts.

Introduction of Report:
In this report we will give information of Expert Systems, in this we provide the working of
an Expert System by covering different examples and also talk about its features and
advantages. We also tell you about different expert systems and the way of solving Problems
by Expert systems. Report also includes the rules on which Expert Systems work and the
steps which are necessary for Making or for taking work from Expert System.

Literature Review:
An expert system is a computer program designed to simulate the problem-solving behavior of a
human who is an expert in a narrow domain or discipline.  An expert system is normally composed of
a knowledge base (information, heuristics, etc.), inference engine (analyzes the knowledge base), and
the end user interface (accepting inputs, generating outputs).
Expert systems are capable of delivering quantitative information, much of which has been developed
through basic and applied research (e.g. economic thresholds, crop development models, pest
population models) as well as heuristics to interpret qualitatively derived values, or for use in lieu of
quantitative information.  Another feature is that these systems can address imprecise and incomplete
data through the assignment of confidence values to inputs and conclusions.
One of the most powerful attributes of expert systems is the ability to explain reasoning.  Since the
system remembers its logical chain of reasoning, a user may ask for an explanation of a
recommendation and the system will display the factors it considered in providing a particular
recommendation.  This attribute enhances user confidence in the recommendation and acceptance of
the expert system.
Basri (1999) noticed that an expert system attempts to emulate how a human expert solves a problem,
mostly by the manipulation of symbols instead of numbers. Whereas conventional algorithmic
programming replaced most of the sophisticated, analytical work of engineers, expert systems are
especially suitable for the no-less important tasks of the ill-structured and less deterministic parts of
planning and design.

Introduction:
An expert system is a computer program conceived to simulate some forms of human reasoning
(by the intermediary of an inference engine) and capable to manage an important quantity of
specialized knowledge.
A system that uses human knowledge captured in a computer to solve problems that ordinarily require
human expertise (Turban & Aronson, 2001).
A computer program designed to model the problem solving ability of a human expert (Durkin, 1994).
An intelligent computer program that uses knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems that
was difficult enough to acquire significant human expertise for their solutions (Feigenbaum).
An expert system is a computer application that solves complicated problems that would otherwise
require extensive human expertise. To do so, it simulates the human reasoning process by applying
specific knowledge and interfaces. This report explained on the expert system for decision making of
giving the best solution to solve the PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant) problems.
These capacities for reasoning and management allow the system to target a small number of relevant
hypotheses in the mass of potential diagnoses and being able to find a satisfactory diagnostic
conclusion. Two characteristics of the expert system are essential to accomplish this task:

 the aptitude to process an important mass of specialized knowledge and

  the aptitude to simulate the human reasoning (in an imperfect manner).

The idea to develop this system has arises base on the capabilities and the potential of the expert
system as described above.  It can be use mainly for giving appropriate countermeasures according to
the accurate and consistent diagnosis of PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant) troubleshoots.  It is called
PDAMum.
PDAMum is essential since the emergence of handheld devices, and now it is rapidly owned by
various levels of peoples, there is somehow a need of a system that able to help them to manage their
devices whenever necessary.  PDAMum is making its decision during the interview, looking for the
optimal way to reach their conclusions: to make a diagnosis.

Working of Expert System:

Below are some diagrams that show the basis how an expert system works.

Figure 1: Major parts of an expert system

Figure 2: Typical knowledge acquisition processes for building an expert system
Expert systems should be viewed as a particular type of information system. Expert systems are
distinct in terms of their approach to problem representation, as information systems process
information, while expert systems attempt to process knowledge.  Knowledge in an expert system
may originate from many sources, such as textbooks, reports, databases, case studies, empirical data,
and personal experience. The dominant source of knowledge in today's expert systems is the dominant
expert. A knowledge engineer usually obtains knowledge through direct interaction with the expert

Figure 3: Expert System and User Interaction

In the expert system there are widely use in many application areas. There are few type of problem
solving paradigm such as control, design, diagnosis, instruction, interpretation, monitoring, planning,
prediction, prescription, selection and simulation.

Steps of Solving Problems:

Phase 1: Problem Assessment
Most organizations when considering any new technology will ask the very practical questions ‘Will
it work?’ and ‘Why should we try it?’ Since PDAMum is relatively new, answers to these questions
are at best educated guesses.
Then, this is a methodology for assessing the applicability of PDAMum to a given problem.
It’s structured according to the following tasks:
Task 1: Determine motivation of organization
Task 2: Identify candidate problems
Task 3: Performs feasibility study
Task 4: Perform cost/ benefit analysis
Task 5: Select the best project
Task 6: Write the project proposal
Phase 2: Knowledge Acquisition & Analysis
This task is the most difficult challenge in the development of an expert system. Knowledge
acquisition is inherently a cyclical process. PDAMum used these tasks of knowledge collection, its
interpretation and analysis, and the design of methods for collecting additional knowledge. An expert
system gains its power from the knowledge it contains (Durkin, 1994).

Phase 3: Design and Implementation

This phase begin with the selection of the knowledge representation technique and control strategy.
This is followed with the selection of a software tool that best meets the needs of the problem. A
small prototype of PDAMum is then built to both validate the project and to provide guidance for
future work. PDAMum is then further developed and refined to meet the project objectives.
This process is structured according to the following task:
Task 1: Select rules as Knowledge representation technique
Task 2: Select control technique
Task 3: Select Kawa as PDAMum development software
Task 4: Develop the prototype, interface, and product
A rule-based approach is suitable because PDAMum discusses the problem primarily using IF/ THEN
type statements. This discussion will usually lack an in-depth description of the problem’s objects,
which would justify the need for a frame-based approach. Classification problems are typical of this
situation where the expert tries to classify the state of some issue according to available information.
The keys to effective interface design are consistency, clarify and control. Consistency is consistent
on screen format. Various types of materials are presented on screen such as title, questions, answer,
explanation and control functions. When presenting these materials, it supposes to be that the similar
material is place in the same location. Clarify is to clarify of presented materials. PDAMum used
screen to ask questions, provide explanation on the system’s reasoning and display intermediate or
final results.

Phase 4: Testing
As the PDAMum will need to be periodically tested and evaluated to assure that its performance is
converging toward established goals. It is important that these decisions be made early, at a time when
the original project goals are established.
These are the evolution of testing or evaluation of testing for PDAMum:
Stage 1: Preliminary Testing

 Study the complete knowledge base

 Uncover deficiencies in the knowledge and reasoning strategies
 Validate knowledge representation and inference approach

Stage 2: Demonstration Testing

 Choose a problem of limited scope within the capabilities of PDAMum

 Use demonstration to validate the expert system approach
 Show off major PDAMum features
 Design interface to accommodate of the user

Stage 3: Informal Validation Testing

 Select typical past test cases

  Evaluate PDAMum’s ability in solving typical cases and
 Identify PDAMum deficiencies and obtain comments from user on the interface

Stage 4: Refinement Testing

 Select unusual past test cases

 Evaluate PDAMum’s ability in solving unusual cases
 Uncover deficiencies in PDAMum’s knowledge and control
 Identify PDAMum deficiencies

Stage 5: Formal Testing

 Select past test cases and define test criteria

 Run the PDAMum for each test case and ask evaluators to judge system’s performance for
each test case
 Obtain comments on the interface
 Identify PDAMum strength and deficiencies

Stage 6: Field Testing

 Define test criteria for the field test

 Determine if PDAMum meets its original goals when applied to real problems

Phase 5: Documentation
This documentation serves as a personal diary of the project. It contains all the material collected
during the project that needs to be reference for developing the system. If properly designed, it will
also serve the later tasks of maintaining PDAMum and writing the PDAMum’s final report.
Phase 6: Maintenance
After finished all of the designing, implementing, testing and documentation, PDAMum may need to
be refined or updated to meet current needs. It is extremely important to keep good records on any
changes made to PDAMum. If this isn’t done, it is very easy to lose track of the PDAMum’s
knowledge. And each time PDAMum is modified; the following critical pieces of information should
be documented:

 What was modified and who performed the modification

 When the modification was made
 Why the modification was made

Advantages of Expert System:

There are many well known advantages to using computerized tools and expert systems:

 reduction of missing data,

  better collection of data,
 no omission of questions,
 no data transcription,
 broader coverage of diagnoses

Examples and Applications in Real Life:

The few examples are as follow:

Agricultural Expert systems:

Rice-Crop Doctor National
Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE) has developed an expert system to
diagnose pests and diseases for rice crop and suggest preventive/curative measures. The rice crop
doctor illustrates the use of expert-systems.

Farm Advisory System Punjab

Agricultural University, Ludhiana, has developed the Farm Advisory System to support agri-business
management. The conversation between the system and the user is arranged in such a way that the
system asks all the questions from user one by one which it needs to give recommendations on the
topic of farm Management.

AGREX
Center for Informatics Research and Advancement, Kerala has prepared an Expert System called
AGREX to help the Agricultural field personnel give timely and correct advice to the farmers. These
Expert Systems find extensive use in the areas of fertilizer application, crop protection, irrigation
scheduling, and diagnosis of diseases in paddy and post harvest technology of fruits and vegetables.

Medical Expert System:

HELP The
HELP (Health Evaluation through Logical Processes) System is a complete knowledge based hospital
information system. It supports not only the routine application of an HIS including ADT, order
entry/charge capture, pharmacy, radiology, nursing documentation, ICU monitoring, but also supports
a robust decision support function.
The HELP system is an example of this type of knowledge-based hospital information system.

PEIRS
(Pathology Expert Interpretative Reporting System) appends interpretative comments to chemical
pathology reports (Edwards et al., 1993). The
knowledge acquisition strategy is the Ripple Down Rules method, which has allowed a pathologist to
build over 2300 rules without knowledge engineering or programming support.. PEIRS commented
on about 100 reports/day. Domains covered include thyroid function tests, arterial blood gases,
glucose tolerance tests, hCG, catecholamines and a range of other hormones.

Puff
The Puff system diagnoses the results of pulmonary function tests. Puff went into production at
Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco in 1977. Several hundred copies have been sold
and are in use around the world. The PUFF system for automatic interpretation of pulmonary function
tests has been sold in its commercial form to hundreds of sites world-wide (Snow et al., 1988). PUFF
went into production at Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco in 1977, making it one
of the very earliest medical expert systems in use. Many thousands of cases later, it is still in routine
use.

SETH
The aim of SETH is to give specific advice concerning the treatment and monitoring of drug
poisoning. Currently, the data base contains the 1153 most toxic or most frequently ingested French
drugs from 78 different toxicological classes. The SETH
expert system simulates expert reasoning, taking into account for each toxicological class, delay,
clinical symptoms and ingested dose. It generates accurate monitoring and treatment advice,
addressing also drug interactions and drug exceptions.

Vithoulkas Expert System

Now, there is an expert system that has been developed by Whole Health Now. The system called,
Vithoulkas Expert System (VES). VES brings the case analysis of George Vithoulkas about the
remedy decisions. George himself impressed with this software’s uncanny precision that he used own
practice. And, his success rate has climbed from 80-85% astounding 90-95% as a result.
Actually, VES is working with any RADAR package then will come out with the result. RADAR is
Repertory software, based on the Synthesis Repertory first repertory to bridge the gap between
repertories and clinic confirmed experience. RADAR allowed the user to create a report on own
standards. "They
wrote down what I said and then translated my thinking into mathematical formulas. This went on
until we had created thousands of rules and sub-rules. Then we worked further to refine each rule
until, it was as precise as it could possibly be."

Conclusion and Recommendations:

PDAMum like other expert system will go a tremendous phases from simple expert system to the
complex multipurpose systems. Hybrid expert system and together with fuzzy expert system can be
seen as a new techniques that be used by researchers lately.  Implementation of expert system in such
fields is greatly influenced by techniques and methods from adaptive hypertext and hypermedia.
Features of personalization, user modeling and ability of adaptive towards environment will become
great challenges to settle. It can be used as a guideline to promote an expert system in various
functions.
In future, PDAMum can be used together with artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic
algorithms and other methods of Artificial Intelligence. These methods allow taking into account their
advantages in the designed system and, therefore, new designed systems are more powerful
instruments to facilitate various tasks that require instant, accurate and reliable results.

Summary: Expert
systems have been used to solve a wide range of problems in domains such as medicine, mathematics,
engineering, geology, computer science, business, law, defense and education. Within each domain,
they have been used to solve problems of different types. Types of problem involve diagnosis (e.g., of
a system fault, disease or student error); design (of a computer systems, hotel etc); and interpretation
(of, for example, geological data). The appropriate problem solving technique tends to depend more
on the problem type than on the domain.

PDAMum as an expert system might make mistakes, but it is less than a human did.  Furthermore it
always performs consistently, never become tired or bored.  Other clear different is PDAMum can be
use anywhere anytime compared to human.
User may clarify their PDA synchronization problem with immediate response and retrieve such
reliable diagnosis through PDAMum.  This feature will assist them to recognize the causes that
disallow their PDA synchronization.  They may ask PDAMum why they being ask such question
during the interaction process. 
In future, PDAMum can be improve by convert it as web base application.  Instead of working stand
alone, PDAMum can be reach through website which wider the access location.  User from various
PDA owners may solely use single expert system to overcome their PDA’s problem.
PDAMum also should have better explanation facility.  This can be achieve if it has more rules to
deals with other PDA problem such as sound and power management.  With additional knowledge,
PDAMum can solve and refine the problem deeper, so that user may consider other possibility that
blocked their PDA from perform well.
Other rational expansions are image viewer and uncertainty factor.  PDAMum can be utilize better if
it can view meaningful image that will support it’s diagnose and decision.  Uncertainty also crucial
since user sometime cannot express their feels.  With Certainty Factor (CF) capability, PDAMum will
increase user confidence and convince them to make right choice.