Diagnostic expert system monitor.

摘要

An online valve monitoring system senses operational characteristics of a valve and provides a diagnosis of aberrations in the characteristics. Sensor signals from the valve are transmitted to a diagnostic processor which extracts characteristic features from the sensor signals as deviations from baseline data for the valve or operational values for predetermined reference operations. An expert system applies a rule base to the characteristic features or operational values; the expert system being updated in a largely automatic process by collecting operational and maintenance data which is linked together to produce data-derived rules. Criteria are defined for comparing the data-derived rules and pre-existing rules in the rule base. All data-derived rules meeting the criteria and, if only single-valued conclusion parameters are in the rules, the pre-existing rules meeting the criteria are placed on the agenda. Each of the rules on the agenda are compared with all of the other rules or, when a multi-valued conclusion parameter is used in the criteria, with all of the pre-existing rules in a pool of rules meeting the criteria. For each pair of rules, if the conclusions conflict and the premises are not mutually exclusive (or independent if a multi-valued conclusion parameter is used in the criteria), the pair of rules are placed on a conflict list which is output to a human expert for evaluation to produce an updated rule base. <IMAGE>