The toolkit for development of hybrid expert systems

The architecture of the toolkit ESWin (Expert Systems under Windows) and hybrid expert systems supported by it are described. Knowledge representation by rules and frames is used. The possibility of keeping and extracting data from external databases by external programs is provided. Frames allow one to describe an application domain in terms of hierarchies of classes and owners. Frames consist of slots, which can be symbols, numerical or linguistic variables, or date and time. Frames can be joined with rules and procedures, processing determined events. Three types of frames are used: frame classes; frame examples, in which facts are described; and frame patterns, in which situations (events, examples, etc.) are described. Inverse fuzzy inference is used as the main method of knowledge processing. Fuzzy rules are assigned and processed, on the one hand, by using certain factors of conclusions of rules, and, on the other hand, by using linguistic variables. A user can enter both numerical and fuzzy symbol values of corresponding slots using linguistic variables. The ESWin software consists of three modules - a shell-interpreter, an editor-constructor of knowledge bases and a program for the viewing and diagnosis of knowledge bases