ABSTRACT
Many problems in industry that lend themselves to an expert system solution include “time” as a problem dimension. Monitoring and control applications are two areas in which representing temporal elements and reasoning about those elements occur. For expert system developers, two special challenges exist in creating monitoring and control applications where time is involved. The first problem is the large volume of temporal relations that can occur among facts in the knowledge base. The second problem is that temporal applications impose an order on events, whereas an expert system is non-procedural. This research-in-progress evaluates an expert system shell, CLIPS, in terms of requirements that temporal expert systems should possess. We also use an extension to CLIPS that establishes and maintains temporal relations to create some typical monitoring and control scenarios for a workflow application.
