Building a knowledge-efficient sanding advisor

Recently, more and more problems in the petroleum industry are being analyz ed by the Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) technology. However, the cost in te rms of time and money remains high. To handle this problem smartly, an opti mum combination of machine resources, programming skills and development to ols has been used in the development of a petroleum-industry sanding adviso r/expert-system. Starting with an overview of the system's knowledge-base a nd knowledge engineering process, this paper proceeds to discuss its object -oriented programming aspects as well as its reasoning models and graphical user interface characteristics. In addition to the benefits of class inher itance for representing taxonomic knowledge, the message-passing aspect of object-oriented systems simplified the representation of the program's vari ous modules and interacting components, thus allowing the knowledge enginee r to deal with the complexity of the simulation process. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.