ABSTRACT
10.1 Introduction
In the past decade, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for providing assistance in the solution of engineering problems has been recognized. AI deals with the development of cognitive models and computer programs to emulate the intelligence of human beings. In the early work on AI, researchers attempted to develop general problem solvers, which are categorized as weak methods. However, these efforts were met with a number of impediments. Their power was found to be quite limited in so far as solving practical complex problems was concerned. One of the reasons is that they may lead to combinatorial explosion as the complexity of problems increases. Another important reason was that most of the problems these methods solved were common-sense reasoning tasks, i.e. they did not require any special kind of knowledge to solve. It was then suggested that AI techniques could be made more effective by adding domain knowledge. This led to the development of knowledge-based systems (KBS). In this chapter, the characteristics of knowledge-based systems are described. Several real applications of knowledge-based systems are also demonstrated.
