Empirical and functional knowledge in an expert system for fault diagnosis

An expert system for car fault diagnosis is presented. The expert system´s originality lies in the combined use of empirical and functional knowledge about a controlled apparatus. Another salient feature is the knowledge-base organization, which allows the two kinds of knowledge to be represented in a single database, so that the inference engines used (empirical and functional) may share the knowledge about the apparatus, and work together until no more information is found, or a solution is reached. The designer´s major effort has been the integration of these two kinds of knowledge