Experience of an expert system technology transfer project

In the early 1989 a five year project was started to improve the application of knowledge based techniques to energy-efficient steel and MetaI production. One purpose of the project is to build systems that help reduce the energy costs by using expert systems and other knowledge based methods. The other purpose is to teach the participants knowledge engineering. Three metal producing companies, one university and one research institute participate in the project. First we planned that we could create close application level co-operation between the participants. But this soon turned out to be inefficient because of the variation in the metal production processes and strategies. That is why we have been developing four different applications simultaneously in this project. Good solutions to our application problems are more important than the type of technology used. Although the programming needed is mostly conventional, many part problems are best solved with knowledge based methods. In different parts of this project we have been applying some popular expert system shells, object oriented programming, prototyping, fuzzy modelling and artificial neural nets. So we have gained experience with different approaches in some industrial applications and environments.