Building a knowledge-efficient sanding advisor

Recently, more and more problems in the petroleum industry are being analyzed by the Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) technology. However, the cost in terms of time and money remains high. To handle this problem smartly, an optimum combination of machine resources, programming skills and development tools has been used in the development of a petroleum-industry sanding advisor/expert-system. Starting with an overview of the system’s knowledge-base and knowledge engineering process, this paper proceeds to discuss its object-oriented programming aspects as well as its reasoning models and graphical user interface characteristics. In addition to the benefits of class inheritance for representing taxonomic knowledge, the message-passing aspect of object-oriented systems simplified the representation of the program’s various modules and interacting components, thus allowing the knowledge engineer to deal with the complexity of the simulation process. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.