Fault diagnosis of a sewage plant

A project whose aim is the development of an expert system for managing and diagnosing a sewage plant is presented. After a short description of how the knowledge acquisition process took place, the authors explain why the popular model-based diagnosis approach cannot be applied to the problem domain. Instead, they consider associative knowledge to solve the diagnostic problem. In order to adequately express knowledge about the structure of the sewage plant, knowledge about well understood subprocesses and associative knowledge for the diagnosis of the sewage plant, the authors designed the MOTES_DM tool that supports hybrid knowledge representation. MOTES_DM allows separation of associative knowledge from structural knowledge concerning the technical system