Functional reasoning in a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) expert system

The issue of representing the knowledge of how systems work is approached from a functional perspective. A knowledge base organized around a functional representation provides the inference procedure with a focus of attention directed toward expected goals, and guides the reasoning process in determining the effects of a system's failure modes. The functional representation described includes relationships to more detailed schemes, including numerical techniques and qualitative simulations of the causal behavior of systems. A functional representation is domain-general in that functional primitives provide a language more general than any one system being modeled. The blackboard framework is proposed as a comprehensive problem-solving architecture for integrating the functional approach with other simulation and representation techniques.<<ETX>>