ESCSD – expert system for control system design

The purpose of this paper is to design an expert system for control system design. The architecture of ESCSD is designed and implemented using CLIPS, which is an expert system building tool. The achievements of ESCSD are extracting the heuristics of design approaches, building design methods into knowledge‐bases, partitioning of knowledge‐bases, and providing explanation facilities. The user interface of ESCSD is icon‐based with pop‐up menus for user selections. We have demonstrated in this paper that this kind of user interface is better than previous similar systems, where complex dialogues are required. Also, due to the flexible partitions of the knowledge‐bases, ESCSD can be implemented successfully on the IBM PC with a limited 640K‐byte MSDOS environment. It is further explained that, regardless of the computer size, the knowledge‐bases must be partitioned into the smallest entities to allow future expansion. Several design examples are fully illustrated to clarify the advantages of using the expert system to design control systems.