Abstract
Most expert systems (ES) have been programmed in artificial intelligence languages such as LISP and PROLOG. This paper proposes a new approach which programs an ES for plant failure diagnosis in a data manipulation language (DML) of a relational database. The personal computer DML of dBASE II or K-MAN is used here. The approach is first justified. Then a knowledge acguisition and representation scheme of incremental refinement type is introduced for the failure diagnosis, and the inference engine and others are implemented accordingly by the DML. The resulting ES is overviewed and it is demonstrated by application to two subsystems of a ship engine propulsion system.
