EXPERTS SYSTEM IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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. It solves the most complex issue as an expert
by extracting the knowledge stored in its knowledge base.
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. The performance of an expert system is based
on the expert's knowledge stored in its knowledge base. 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.
Below is the block diagram that represents the working of an expert system:
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 knowledge base 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.
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.
Components of Expert System
An expert system mainly consists of three components:
User Interface
Inference Engine
Knowledge Base
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.
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 knowledge base to derive a conclusion or
deduce new information. It helps in deriving an error-free solution of queries asked by the
user.
With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the knowledge from the knowledge
base.
There are two types of inference engine:
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.
Inference engine uses the below 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.
3. 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.
It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a particular domain or
subject.
One can also view the knowledge base 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.
Components of Knowledge Base
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 knowledge base
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 knowledge base.
Why Expert Systems?
Advantages of Expert System
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.
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.
Applications of Expert System
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. The two popular ES used for this domain is an advisor and a tax
advisor.
In the finance domain, 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, 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.