A Method of Knowledge Base Verification for Nuclear Power Plant Expert System Using Extended Petri Nets

Abstract

The adoption of expert systems mainly as operator supporting systems is becoming increasingly popular as the control algorithms of system become more and more sophisticated and complicated. The verification phase of knowledge base is an important part for developing reliable expert systems, especially in nuclear industry. Although several strategies or tools have been developed to perform potential error checking, they often neglect the reliability of verification methods. Because a Petri net provides a uniform mathematical formalization of knowledge base, it has been employed for knowledge base verification. In this work, we devise and suggest an automated tool, called COKEP(Checker Of Knowledge base using Extended Petri net), for detecting incorrectness, inconsistency, and incompletensess in a knowledge base. The scope of the verification problem is expanded to chained errors, unlike previous studies that assume error incidence to be limited to rule pairs only. In addition, we consider certainty factor in checking, because most of knowledge bases have certainty factors.