Designing knowledge-based systems within functional architecture: the DIVA experiment

An assessment is made of the use of functional architecture for knowledge-based systems. The discussion is based on the experience gained while designing DIVA, an expert system for vibration-based monitoring of large rotating machinery. The authors describe the system and show how its task decomposition results from the characteristics of the problem. They explain how this approach makes it possible to build more sophisticated explanations of reasoning. They also show how knowledge acquisition has been achieved in this framework and discuss the maintainability of such systems