Trust Academy

In Collaboration with

Midlands State University

Bachelor of Science (Hons.) Management Information Systems

FINAL EXAMINATION – OCTOBER 2018

BMIS225 : EXPERT SYSTEMS AND KNOWLEDGE - BASED

SYSTEMS

TIME : 3 HOURS

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATE:

1. Answer all questions from Section A and any 3 questions from Section B
2. Start each question on a new page

There are 3 printed pages for this question paper

SECTION A: Answer ALL questions from this section

QUESTION 1

1
 a. What are the major benefits of the Expert System compared to the manual system? [6
marks]
b. Briefly describe the conflict resolution strategies; specificity, recency and refractoriness
[6 marks]
c. Describe with the aid of a diagram the basic structure of a production rule system [8
marks]

QUESTION 2
a. Briefly describe what is uninformed and informed search? Name examples of uninformed
and informed search strategies in lists and trees. [6 marks]
b. Briefly discuss how ants find the shortest route to the food source [5 marks]
c. List any five characteristics of human intelligence that can be applied in Expert and
Knowledge based systems [5 marks]

d. Consider the graph shown in Fig.1 where nodes are labeled alphabetically and edges have
associated costs.

Fig 1: Example of a tree

List the labels in the order they would be visited when performing depth and breath-first search
starting from A. Assume that neighbors of the same node are visited in alphabetical order.
[4
marks]

SECTION B: Choose any THREE questions from this section each question carries 20 marks.

2
QUESTION 3
Use the following knowledge description to answer (i) and (ii).
“Every human, animal and bird is living thing who breathe and eat. All birds can fly. All man
and woman are humans who have two legs. Cat is an animal and has a fur. All animals have skin
and can move. Giraffe is an animal who is tall and has long legs. Parrot is a bird and is green in
color”.
i. Represent the given description using the Semantic network diagram [10 marks]
ii. Convert the semantic network diagram in (i) to a frame diagram [10 marks]

QUESTION 4
a. Compare and contrast conventional systems and expert systems [8 marks]
b. With the aid of diagrams, compare and contrast the structure of an Expert system on the
‘Human Expert Problem’ and ‘Expert System Problem’ solving. [12 marks]

QUESTION 5
a. List and explain the different types of Knowledge Base system Applications.[12 Marks]
b. Describe the characteristics of expert systems. [8 Marks]

QUESTION 6
Write short notes on each of the following:
i. Knowledge Engineering [4 Marks]
ii. Knowledge Acquisition [4 Marks]
iii. Knowledge Representation [4 Marks]
iv. Knowledge Management [4 Marks]
v. Knowledge Elicitation [4 Marks]

3
1