Intelligent Monitoring and Control

Human operators of monitoring and control systems typically perform knowledge intensive tasks requiring human intervention in diverse and sometimes critical situations. The cognitive overload to which they are submitted may motivate human errors which compromise safety and performance. Expert Systems offer the means to codify and automate the use of the knowledge of the best experts in a given domain, and may provide support to monitoring, diagnosis and control tasks. In this text we will make an overview of what expert systems are, what they may offer and what they don’t. We will present their typical architecture and the most common knowledge representation formalisms and reasoning mechanisms, and discuss how they may deal with uncertainty. The lifecycle of an Expert System will also be presented, special attention being devoted to knowledge acquisition activities. An overview of some applications of expert systems to monitoring and control will be given, as well as some alternative approaches.