KASE project toward effective diagnosis system development

The Knowledge Acquisition Support Environment (KASE) and some case studies on expert system development are described. DiPROS is a diagnostic expert system building tool, which has a knowledge base editor and an inference engine specialized for diagnostic tasks. DiKAST is an interactive knowledge-acquisition (KA) tool, which guides repairs on defects in the knowledge base. In order to build this KA facility, many kinds of KA interview strategies were formalized. We applied KASE tools in building a defect diagnosis system for a color picture tube manufacturing plant. The prototype system was able to be developed in a short time by the domain experts alone, who had no previous experience in computer programming.