A Real Time Expert System for Faults Identification in Rotary Railcar Dumpers

This paper describes the development of a real-time Expert System applied to the ore extraction Industrial branch, specifically used to assist the decision making and fault identification on rotary railcar dumpers of the operational productive system located at Ponta da Madeira Dock Terminal, built and operated by Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (now referred just as VALE) in São Luis-MA. The Expert System is built on JESS (Java Expert System Shell) platform and provides support to engineers and operators during the ore unloading as soon as supplying on-line information about faults triggered by device sensors of the rotary railcar. The system’s conception involves the application of CommonKADS methodology, knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence techniques at the symbolic level for representing and organizing the knowledge domain in which the system is applied.