Putting Expert Systems Into Practice

This book discusses strategies and tactics for creating robust production applications. It addresses those general principles for success that will not become outdated as new products are released and application areas expand. Strategies and guidelines are emphasized rather than extensive documentation of existing implementations. The discussion includes a broad analysis of leading and emergent shell tools, tool sets, environments, and symbolic programming languages within the context of examining generic expert system development tool features.

Within the metal and mining industries, the use of expert systems for monitoring and control is on the increase. The content of each paper had to include both expert systems, neural networks or fuzzy control. The papers were evenly contributed from industry, universities and research institutes, thus this book provides a valuable insight into the theoretical as well as the practical applications currently in use within the industry.

Expert system technology is receiving increasing popularity and acceptance in the engineering community. This is due to the fact that there actually exists a close match between the capabilities of the current generation expert systems and the requirements of engineering practice. Prepared by a distinguished team of experts, this book provides a balanced state-of-the-art presentation of the design principles of engineering expert systems, and a representative picture of their capabilities to assist efficiently the design, diagnosis and operation of complex industrial plants. Among the application areas covered are the following: hardware synthesis, industrial plant layout design, fault diagnosis, process control, image analysis, computer communication, electric power systems, intelligent control, robotics, and manufacturing systems. The book is appropriate for the researcher and the professional. The researcher can save considerable time in searching the scattered technical information on engineering expert systems. The professional can have readily available a rich set of guidelines and techniques that are applicable to a wide class of engineering domains.

One step above knowledge management systems are business intelligence systems. Their purpose is to give decision makers a better understanding of their organization's operations, and thus another way to outmaneuver the competition, by helping to find and extract the meaningful relationships, trends, and correlations that underlie the organization's operations and ultimately contribute to its success. Thierauf also shows that by tying critical success factors and key performance indicators into business intelligence systems, an organization's most important financial ratios can also be improved. Comprehensive and readable, Thierauf's book will advance the knowledge and skills of all information systems providers and users. It will also be useful as a text in upper-level courses covering a wide range of topics essential to an understanding of executive business systems generally, and specifically their creation and management. The theme underlying Thierauf's unique text is that a thorough understanding of a company's operations is crucial if the company is to be moved to a higher level of competitive advantage. Although data warehousing, data mining, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and other electronic aids have been in place for at least a decade, it is the remarkable and unique capability of business intelligence systems to utilize them that has in turn revolutionized the ability of decision makers to find, accumulate, organize, and access a wider range of information than was ever before possible. Effective business intelligence systems give decision makers a means to keep their fingers on the pulse of their businesses every step of the way. From this it follows that they are thus able to develop new, more workable means to cope with the competition successfully. Comprehensive and readable, Thierauf's book will advance the knowledge and skills of all information systems providers and users. It will also be useful as a text in upper-level courses covering a wide range of topics essential to an understanding of executive business systems generally, and specifically their creation and management.

During the last two decades, a tremendous growth in the popularity and applications of computers in manufacturing has occurred. Computer aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, flexible manufacturing systems, group technology and many others are considered by many manufacturing executives as the most promising technologies and philosophies that, if successfully implemented, can reduce costs and enable the US manufacturing companies to become more competitive in the global market. In the computer-integrated manufacturing environ ment, the decision processes are often more involved. The decision makers are frequently required to have access to a vast amount of data to support and analyze their complex decision problems at strategic and tactical levels. Decision support systems are often referred to as computer-based information technologies that allow the decision makers to interactively communicate and solve the decision problems. Manufacturing Decision Support Systems is intended to report the latest developments and address the central issues in this area. This volume consists of 14 refereed chapters, written by leading researchers from academia and industry.

As the 21st century begins, we are faced with opportunities and challenges of available technology as well as pressured to create strategic and tactical plans for future technology. Worldwide, IT professionals are sharing and trading concepts and ideas for effective IT management, and this co-operation is what leads to solid IT management practices. This volume is a collection of papers that present IT management perspectives from professionals around the world. The papers seek to offer new ideas, refine old ones, and pose interesting scenarios to help the reader develop company-sensitive management strategies.