OBOES: an object-oriented expert system for hardware diagnosis

There is a critical awareness in industry that logic-based and rule-based expert systems are not going to be adequate for the type of complex tasks that typically arise in a wide variety of engineering applications. The main-problem is a lack of standardization concerning parallel implementation of logic programs and rule-based systems. These findings question whether full-scale industrial implementations of intelligent systems should be in these forms. There is consequently a search for alternative symbolic paradigms. The authors have adopted the paradigm of object-orientation in the design, development and implementation of a hardware diagnostic system to demonstrate the potential application of object-oriented expert systems (OBOESs) to a wide variety of industrial problems. One attractive feature of an OBOES is the idea that parallel implementation via distributed object systems becomes feasible