An Expert System

An Expert System
What is an Expert System?

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
compsex 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:

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
knowledge base of the particular domain.
Below are some popular examples of the Expert System:

o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o CaDeT: The CaDet expert system is a diagnostic support system that
can detect cancer at early stages.
Characteristics of Expert System

o High Performance: The expert system provides high performance

for solving any type of complex problem of a specific domain with
high efficiency and accuracy.
o 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.
o Reliable: It is much reliable for generating an efficient and accurate
output.
o 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:

o User Interface
o Inference Engine
o 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)

o 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.
o With the help of an inference engine, the system extracts the
knowledge from the knowledge base.
o There are two types of inference engine:
o Deterministic Inference engine: The conclusions drawn from this
type of inference engine are assumed to be true. It is based
on facts and rules.
o 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:

o Forward Chaining: It starts from the known facts and rules, and
applies the inference rules to add their conclusion to the known
facts.
o Backward Chaining: It is a backward reasoning method that starts
 from the goal and works backward to prove the known facts.

3. Knowledge Base

oThe 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.
o It is similar to a database that contains information and rules of a
particular domain or subject.
o 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

o Factual Knowledge: The knowledge which is based on facts and

accepted by knowledge engineers comes under factual knowledge.
o 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.

Development of Expert System

Here, we will explain the working of an expert system by taking an example

of MYCIN ES. Below are some steps to build an MYCIN:

o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o In the end, it will provide a response to the patient by using the user
interface.
Participants in the development of Expert System
There are three primary participants in the building of Expert System:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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:

1. 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.
2. High Efficiency: If the knowledge base is updated with the correct
knowledge, then it provides a highly efficient output, which may not
be possible for a human.
3. Expertise in a domain: There are lots of human experts in each
domain, and they all have different skills, 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
4. Not affected by emotions: These systems are not affected by
human emotions such as fatigue, anger, depression, anxiety, etc..
Hence the performance remains constant.
5. High security: These systems provide high security to resolve any
query.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Capabilities of the Expert System

Below are some capabilities of an Expert System:

o Advising: It is capable of advising the human being for the query of

any domain from the particular ES.
o 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.
o Demonstrate a device: It is capable of demonstrating any new
products such as its features, specifications, how to use that
product, etc.
o Problem-solving: It has problem-solving capabilities.
o Explaining a problem: It is also capable of providing a detailed
description of an input problem.
o Interpreting the input: It is capable of interpreting the input given
by the user.
o Predicting results: It can be used for the prediction of a result.
o 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.

Advantages of Expert System

o These systems are highly reproducible.

o They can be used for risky places where the human presence is not
safe.
o Error possibilities are less if the KB contains correct knowledge.
o The performance of these systems remains steady as it is not
affected by emotions, tension, or fatigue.
o They provide a very high speed to respond to a particular query.

Limitations of Expert System

o The response of the expert system may get wrong if the knowledge
 base contains the wrong information.
o Like a human being, it cannot produce a creative output for
different scenarios.
o Its maintenance and development costs are very high.
o Knowledge acquisition for designing is much difficult.
o For each domain, we require a specific ES, which is one of the big
limitations.
o It cannot learn from itself and hence requires manual updates.

Applications of Expert System

o In designing and manufacturing domain

It can be broadly used for designing and manufacturing physical
devices such as camera lenses and automobiles.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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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