AN IKBS APPROACH TO SURVEILLANCE FOR NAVAL NUCLEAR SUBMARINE PROPULSION

This Paper describes work being carried out to develop an intelligent knowledge-based system (IKBS) for use in the surveillance of naval nuc lear submarine propulsion plant. In recent years, modem process plants have increased automation and installed surveillance equipment while reducing the level of manpower operating and monitoring the plant. As a result, some of the local watchkeeping tasks have been transferred t o control room operators, and the data reduction and warning filtering expertise inherent in focal plant operators has been lost, while an a dditional workload has been placed upon operators. The surveillance sy stems installed to date have therefore been less usable than anticipat ed. The solution being achieved for submarine power plant is to introd uce IKBS into surveillance to replace lost expertise and return to a s ituation in which operators receive small amounts of high quality info rmation rather than large amounts of low quality information.