SHINE Expert System - Background

Background

Knowledge acquisition and implementation from experts is an inefficient and painful process for most automation implementation projects. The phase is often so wrought with difficulty, that the success of the automation project as a whole is jeopardized. The following describes a system called Spacecraft Health Inference Engine (SHINE) which provides a number of solutions to this problem. SHINE is a state-of-the-art solution for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and non-AI problems that up to this point were either impossible or impractical to solve.

SHINE is a high-speed expert system and inference engine based upon the experience and requirements that were collected over the years by the Artificial Intelligence Research group at NASA/JPL in developing expert systems for the diagnosis of spacecraft health.

It is intended for those areas of inferencing where speed, portability and reuse is of critical importance. Such areas would include spacecraft monitoring, control and health, telecommunication analysis, medical analysis, financial and stock market analysis, fraud detection (e.g. banking and credit cards), robotics or basically any area where rapid and immediate response to high-speed and rapidly changing data is required.

SHINE was independently evaluated by UC Berkeley and was shown to significantly outperform commercially available inference engines such as RTI and ART. It executes approximately 500,000,000 plus rules a second running on a standard Windows PC.

• SHINE is written in Common LISP and can be easily run on any system that supports the language. It has been successfully interfaced to many non-LISP systems without any problems.

• VIASPACE has the Caltech licensing rights to most commercial applications of SHINE. They are currently working on both product and commercial enhancements to the SHINE technology as well as several Expert System applications in both the Defense and Security markets.