The Application of a Rule Based Expert System in the Control of a 700km Water Pipeline
Lindsay Lowes, Ian Wiese, Clive Maynard · 1992
The Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply (G&AWS) scheme provides water to towns and farmlands along a 700 kilometer pipeline from Perth to the Kalgoorlie-Kambalda-Norseman region in Western Australia. The major consumers are farming and mining communities. The pipeline was constructed nearly ninety years ago. The basic hydraulic operation has not changed since, but extensive use is now made of the water along the way. This has resulted in great variations in demand and operating conditions daily, weekly and seasonally. Today the operation of the pipeline is a complex process, relying heavily on the ninety years of accumulated experience of the operations personnel. One of the major difficulties faced by the project team was to incorporate the knowledge and experience of the operators into the automation scheme. The new scheme had to be at least as effective as the operators in operating the pipeline. The process of documenting the knowledge, the operating rules and procedures, the acquired knowledge of the hydraulics and constraints of the pipeline proved more difficult than at first anticipated. The result is a rule based expert system incorporating ninety years of experience of the operations personnel in operating the pipeline. This paper follows the project from the application of basic control techniques to the actual implementation, concentrating on the integration of the accumulated knowledge and experience of the operations staff into a workable system.