An interactive fault diagnosis expert system for a helpdesk application

Abstract

This paper presents work on an interactive fault diagnosis expert system for a helpdesk application. A knowledge representation and inference algorithm is proposed to satisfy three design specifications: (1) no parallel event exists in human fault reporting; (2) the diagnostic sequence is unpredictable, and (3) the inference engine is passive in an event-driven environment. A lattice data structure is designed for knowledge representation, which is generated automatically from a script of decision rules. The inference engine works in a transaction-like style by prompting and responding to the user according to the knowledge in the lattice. It can explicitly guide the inference sequence, as w..