Model-based fault diagnosis of hydraulic circuits

The development of an expert system to support the diagnosis of faults in hydraulic circuits is being undertaken jointly by the School of Engineering at the University of Exeter and the Fluid Power Centre at the University of Bath. The system is making use of expert system techniques, graphical user interfaces and high-performance workstations. The authors concentrate on the model-based knowledge base system (KBS) which is being developed as part of an overall architecture. One of the aims is that the KBS should be applicable to a wide variety of hydraulic circuits and hence, given that each circuit is different, the traditional knowledge acquisition that is normally employed within rule-based approaches is not appropriate. The model-based approach chosen facilitates the creation of a re-usable library of software objects to represent components