LES: A General Expert System And Its Applications
W. A. Perkins, Thomas J. Laffey · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1984
The Lockheed Expert System (LES) has been designed to help knowledge engineers quickly solve problems in diagnosing, monitoring, planning, designing, checking, guiding, and interpreting. In its first application, LES was used to guide less-experienced maintenance personnel in the fault diagnosis of a large signal-switching network containing Built-In Test Equipment (BITE). LES used not only the knowledge of the expert diagnostician (captured in the familiar form of "IF-THEN" rules), but also knowledge about the structure, function, and causal relations of the device under study to perform rapid isolation of the module causing the failure. In addition to aiding the engineer in troubleshooting an electronic device, LES can also explain its reasoning and actions to the user, and can provide extensive database retrieval and graphics capabilities. In this paper we show how both the structure of the device and the troubleshooting rules of the expert are conveniently represented using LES's case grammar format. Also, an actual troubleshooting session between a user and LES is presented. By adding goals, rules, database information, and a few special procedures to the general LES framework, we were able to have a working system in a much shorter time (four man-months) than would have been possible starting afresh. The current status of the system is that it has been fielded and is under evaluation. LES is now being applied in other domains which include design checking and photo-interpretation.