---
title: "Representing Procedural Knowledge in Expert Systems: An Application to Process Control"
authors:
  - "Massimo Gallanti"
  - "Giovanni Guida"
  - "Luca Spampinato"
  - "Alberto Stefanini"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/66"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1985/0066.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1985
pages: "345-351"
track: "Expert Systems"
keywords:
---

# Representing Procedural Knowledge in Expert Systems: An Application to Process Control

Massimo Gallanti, Giovanni Guida, Luca Spampinato, Alberto Stefanini

*Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 345-351.

## Abstract

The paper presents a novel expert system architecture which supports explicit representation and effective use of both declarative and procedural knowledge . These two types of expert knowledge are represented by means of production rules and event-graphs respectively, and they are processed by a unified inference engine . Communication between the rule level and the event-graph level is based on a full visibility of each level on the internal state of the other, and it is structured in such a way as to allow each level to exert control on the other . This structure offers several advantages over more traditional architectures . Knowledge representation is more natural and transparent ; knowledge acquisition turns out to be easier as pieces of knowledge can be immediately represented without the need of complex transformation and restructuring; inference is more effective due to reduced non- determinism resulting from explicit representation of fragments of procedural knowledge in eventgraphs; finally, explanations are more natural and understandable . The proposed architecture has been adopted for the design of PROP, an expert system for on-line monitoring of the cycle water pollution in a thermal power plant . PROP is running on a SUN-2 workstation and has been tested on a sample of real cases