Expert system for the determination of the analytical strategy in a laboratory for elemental analysis

Abstract In an analytical laboratory where the expertise and the instrumentation to apply a variety of techniques for the determination of elemental compositions are present, establishing the strategy that has to be followed in order to solve a specific analytical problem is a crucial activity. To determine which techniques should be used and which procedures should be followed as well as their order to execution, requires the synthesis of the possibilities and requirements of the different techniques with respect to the properties of the material to be investigated and the client's demand. As the first step towards an expert system for the analytical technical aspects of this task, the structure of the knowledge domain has been investigated. It is concluded that an overall system can be built incrementally by constructing subsystems for the different techniques and putting these together in a general framework. The structure of the knowledge is found to be the same for all techniques and the developmet of one subsystem is therefore expected to ease the development of following subsystems. The development of such a subsystem for x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, is described in Part 2.