Automatica, Vol, 27, No. 3, pp.
585-590, 1991
Pergamon Press plc. Printed in Great Britain.
International Federation of Automatic Control
Expert Systems Principlesand Programming*
Joseph C. Giarratano and Gary Riley
Reviewer: R. JIROUSEK
Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information
Theory and Automation, Pod vodarenskou vezi 4, CS 182 08
Prague 8, Czechoslovakia.
EXPERT SYSTEMS---one of the most frequent terms in many
fields of present human professional activities--is a term
provoking a lot of questions and contradictory opinions. On
the one hand, the motto "the problem is too hard to cope
with, we need an expert system" has penetrated the
subconscious of many specialists and managers-in-chief;
on the other, there are still papers published, such as
Streitberg (1988) stating the nonexistence of "real" expert
systems. Though there is no exact definition of the expert
system unanimously accepted by the Artificial Intelligence
community, the notion has gained its indisputable place in
AI and has become a regular part of AI courses for both
undergraduate and graduate students.
The book by Joseph Giarratano and Gary Riley is the only
one I know which aims to serve as a basis for courses on
expert systems supplemented with a term project enabling
students to develop skills in their design and programming.
For this purpose, the second part of the book presents a
detailed account of an expert system programming language
CLIPS and the book is supplemented with disc containing a
complete, executable expert system tool integrated with the
text.
CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) was
designed and developed at the Artificial Intelligence Section
of the NASA/Johnson Space Center to facilitate laborious
programming work connected with building expert systems.
Regarding the differences between writing a program in a
procedural language and implementing an expert system, it is
very important for students to complete one or two small
expert systems of their choice. Their task should not be only
the implementation of the given techniques but the project
should consist primarily of choosing the most appropriate
method for the problem in question. For this purpose, a
wide range of methods and techniques used for knowledge
representation and processing in expert systems constitutes
the content of the first part of the book,
As already mentioned above, there is no exact definition of
the expert system. To be called an expert system, a program
product has to meet several requirements. There is a
common consensus about some of them; others are claimed
only by some authors. And yet, it is very difficult, almost
impossible, to say that some requirements are more
important than others. All this wavering is reflected quite
naturally in the first part of the introductory Chapter 1.
Though there is only one paragraph entitled "What is an
expert system", it takes, in fact, nine of them to answer the
question. The remainder of Chapter 1 is devoted to
explanation of the most popular techniques and paradigms
employed in expert systems today. In addition, as an
example of a prospective technique, artificial neural systems
are introduced.
At this place I would like to stress one very positive
feature of the whole book. Whenever a new term is
mentioned, it is illustrated with examples and relations to
other similar concepts are explained. When, for example,
production systems are introduced, the authors do not restrict
themselves only to stating that knowledge is represented in a
form of I F - T H E N rules, and go back to the history and
* Expert Systems--Principles and Programming by J. C.
Giarratano and G. Riley. P,W.S.-KENT, Boston (1989).
ISBN 0878353356, £16.95.
585
AUTO 27:3-~
Book Reviews
show the origins of the production (rule-based) systems in
Post production systems and Markov algorithms.
The same pedagogical way of presentation is used also in
further parts of the book that expand into a detailed
discussion on the theory (or rather theories) behind expert
systems. The theory explains advantages and disadvantages
of individual methods and therefore its knowledge is
necessary when designing an expert system for a specific field
of application. Chapter 2 describes different ways of
knowledge representation. Though the most popular
technique is based on productions, the authors bring in also
semantic nets and frames. They do not explain only scopes
and advantages of these methods but also difficulties with
their application (a paragraph describing difficulties with
production systems is unfortunately missing). A substantial
part of Chapter 2 is also devoted to logic: propositional logic
and first order predicate logic. This creates a necessary
theoretical background for Chapter 3 dealing with methods
of inference. In this chapter, resolution, the primary
inference mechanism of PROLOG, is explained. But
naturally, in accordance with other chapters, the authors pay
attention to several other methods like deduction, induction,
abduction or nonmonotonic ways of inference. All these
methods are again described on examples and compared with
one another.
Accepting the authors' statement that "in the real world
we are seldom absolutely sure of anything except death and
taxes" (and I believe this fact is one of the main impulses
leading to the origin of expert systems), one has to consider
Chapters 4 and 5 to be among the most important theoretical
parts of the book. They form a wide survey of methods
designed for both reasoning under uncertainty and inexact
reasoning. In contrast with logical approach described in the
previous chapters, these methods are important for expert
system application involving uncertain information. The
uncertainty may apply to facts (data), knowledge (rules) or
both. A number of techniques has been suggested to deal
with uncertainty in expert system but some of them are
heuristic, not supported by a mathematical theory. It is a
virtue of the book that it emphasizes theoretically sound
approaches based on either classical probability theory,
Dempster-Shafer theory or Zadeh's fuzzy theory. All
three approaches are introduced in the book with help of
examples some of which are used several times to show the
differences between the individual models.
I have hitherto commented mainly positive aspects of the
book. Now, I would like to mention a certain imperfection
affecting presentation of some theoretical parts and issuing
from the extensive choice of theories included in the book.
For example, when the classical probability theory is
presented, basic terms like sample space, random variable,
probability distribution, conditional probability or
independent events are explained and illustrated with
examples. Nevertheless, the authors do not introduce
concepts like multidimensional distribution which would
make possible to define the dependence between random
variables--the notion used to represent knowledge in most
of the probabilistic expert systems. Similarly, when
discussing resolution as the principal inference rule in
PROLOG it might be useful to mention its ways of
implementation and connected problems (though it can be
found quite easily almost in any PROLOG manual).
With a limited room for introduction of theoretical
foundations of each described method it is fairly difficult to
determine what can be omitted. To offset the subjectivity of
their decision, the authors have supplemented each chapter
with bibliography. It enables the lecturers, who take the
586 Book Reviews
book as a basis for their courses, to go into more detail in the
parts of their choice and to skip some others. There is no
doubt that from this point of view the book is a success. This
feeling is increased also by the fact that each chapter is
supplemented with exercises and problems. Nevertheless, the
book taken as the only source of information may leave a
reader with a rather superficial idea about theory of expert
system. Let us stress that this fact does not, however,
decrease the value of the book as the basis for lectures on
expert system theory and programming. For this reason, I
would like to repeat the words from L. A. Zadeh's foreword:
"Joseph Giarratono and Gary Riley deserve the thanks of all
of us for undertaking a dit~cult task and making an
important contribution to a better understanding of the
fundamentals of expert systems".
Reference
Streitbcrg, B. (1988). On the nonexistence of expert
systems---Critical remarks on artificial intelligence in
Large Space Structures: Dynamics and Control*
S. N . A t l u r i
Reviewer: E. GOTTZEIN
MBB/Deutsche Aerospace, Space Communications and
Propulsion Systems Division, Messerschmitt-B61kow-Blohm
GmbH, D-8000 Miinchen 80, Germany.
AUTOMATIC control of large flexible space structures is one of
the key issues in future spacecraft design. The problem is
characterized by control-structure interaction resulting from
a high number of densely packed structural modes within the
control system bandwidth or close to it, combined with
stringent micro-gravity level or pointing performance
requirements. Examples for control systems of the first type
are in-orbit manufacturing facilities with large solar panels
and of the second type are very large space telescopes and
laser pointing systems requiring pointing and target tracking
to an accuracy of 0.01 arcsec or better. The problem to be
solved is therefore not how to control or stabilize some large
structure somehow but rather how to design both structure
and control system in order to meet stringent system
engineering requirements in an optimal way. This has to be
kept in mind in order to frame the right question and solve
the real problem.
For this new type of space systems, control engineers and
mechanical engineers have to come together early on a
system engineering level to properly match control systems
and structural design parameters to meet overall require-
ments, and to predict on orbit performance of the space
platforms as closely as possible. These two steps, control
system design and overall performance evaluation, require
different types of mathematical models---in particular those
of the structure: a design model approximating the essential
features of the system and a validation or truth model
approximating the real system as closely as possible.
Mathematical models used in control system design have
to properly represent transfer functions and responses
between sensors and actuators, e.g. those located on
different points of a structure. It is on this requirement that
the mathematical modelling of the structure for control
system design has been based. Approximations which are
quite different from the ones which are commonly used in
structure design may lead to better and less complex control
* Large Space Structures: Dynamics and Control by S. N.
Atluri and A. K. Amos. Springer, New York (1988).
ISBN 0-387-18900-9, U.S. $89.50.
statistics. Statistical Software Newsletter 19, 2, 55-62.
About the reviewer
Radim Jirougek was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He
graduated in mathematics from Charles University, Prague,
in 1969, and received the CSc (an equivalent of Ph.D.)
degree in theoretical cybernetics from the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences in 1979.
In 1970 he joined the Medical Cybernetics Laboratory at
the Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, Prague,
where he researched mathematical methods of diagnosis. In
1979 he joined the Information Theory Laboratory, Institute
of Information Theory and Automation of the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences, Prague, where he is head of the
Department of Decision Systems Theory. His present
interest lies in uncertainty processing in expert systems with
emphasis on probabilistic methods. He has published over 40
scientific papers, and at present is scientific secretary of the
Czechoslovak Cybernetic Society.
and A. K. Amos
figurations. Even the extreme case has been demonstrated,
where control problems which were unsolvable or only
solvable at the expense of large complexity became solvable
with technically feasible controllers by re-evaluating the
modelling approach. The iterative procedure between
control system design and modelling approximation is
therefore the first key issue in control-structure interaction.
The second key issue is how to design robust controllers to
stringent performance requirements under high levels of
uncertainty in the mathematical model itself due to the finite
approximations used, the model parameters and the
disturbing environment. Robustness is required to assume
stability and minimum in-orbit performance in the first place
while fine tuning can be done later by in-orbit identification
and adaptation of control configuration and parameters with
the spacecraft already flying in its real environment.
A third key issue is verification of mathematical models
and closed loop system performance by cleverly designed
experiments on ground and in orbit. Even with the powerful
design tools available nowadays, the importance of doing the
right tests on a component as well as on a control system
level cannot be overemphasized. Only by testing can it be
proven that the control system design problems have been
solved correctly and that the right problems have been
solved. Concerning dynamics and control of large flexible
space structures, we are, with all three key issues, just in the
beginning.
The monograph on dynamics and control of large flexible
space structures addresses the first two key issues. Its fifteen
chapters which are written by structural dynamicists and
control "theoreticians" are intended to give the status of this
highly interdisciplinary subject and an indication of future
trends. Stimulating early research work is reported;
unfortunately the chapters stand pretty much by themselves
and are only very loosely related to each other. They are, in
general, well written and give adequate references. In
accordance with the status given in the monograph, the
desired interaction between structural and control specialists
is not yet achieved. The chapters on structural modelling on
one hand oversimplify the control problem, and the chapters
on control system design, on the other hand, are based on
linearized modal characteristics (an approach which is well
supported by practical experience so far) but do not question
the assumptions. The weakness of the monograph is that the
underlying control performance requirements, which are the
real cause of the problem, are hardly stated at all and that