Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts
From: roberts@cognos.uucp (Robert Stanley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Expert Systems in the Railroad Industry.
Message-ID: <2859@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 27 Apr 88 18:48:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: cognos.2859
Posted: Wed Apr 27 14:48:30 1988
References: <8816@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <3573@mtgzy.UUCP> <4643@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 59
Summary: Activity in Canada, Japan, France, UK.

In article <4643@cup.portal.com> tony_mak_makonnen@cup.portal.com writes:
>>      What sort of expert systems have developed for the railroad
>>      industry? 
>  
>Strangely enough, the one that I know of is a General Electric locomotive
>maintenance expert system.  It was mentioned in a computer magazine and
>one of the railfanning mags. last year.
>yes and it was finally coded in Forth.

I missed the original post because our feed has been down for a while, so
can't e-mail a reply.  The system referred to was D.E.L.T.A. (Diesel-
Electric Locomotive Troubleshooting Assistant), and not only was it
re-coded in FORTH, it was delivered on a pretty basic IBM-PC.  An
interesting feature was that the system as installed in G.E.'s workshops
included a full set of locomotive schematics stored on optical disk, and
the user was pointed to the correct area by D.E.L.T.A.  The system was not
developed in FORTH, but once the knowledge base had been completed (they
don't introduce new designs of diesel-electric locos very often) it became
feasible to build a "conventional" re-implementation.  FORTH was chosen for
various technical reasons, including applicability of the stack approach,
and excellent run-time performance.  The development was done in LISP on
something like a PDP-11/23.  The original reference was:

  Bonissone and Johnson "Expert System for Diesel Electric Locomotive
  Repair" - IJCAI-83

I know that CN (Canadian National) have a small but active expert system
group, who have produced several small systems.  One was a diagnostic
system for walkie-talkies (they use tens of thousands), and another was
some kind of locomotive fuel usage monitor/advisor.  I haven't been in
touch with the group recently, so am not up on current work.

CAIP Co (Canadian Artificial Intelligence Products Corp) has a joint
agreement with CP Rail (Canadian Pacific) for the marketing of a lube oil
expert system.

The Transportation Development Centre (TDC) of Transport Canada in Montreal
is active in the expert system field, but I am not sure whether they have
any projects specifically for the rail sector.

The Japanese have been extremely active in this area, but I'd need to look
out a bibliography from a couple of years back for direct references.

A number of interesting systems have been developed in France, which has an
advanced railway system.  The same is true in Britain, but I would have to
do some paper file searching for details.  The only system which springs to
mind is British Telecomm's amazing British-Rail timetable advisor, which
used speech recognition and voice synthesis for unrestricted access via
telephone.

If the original poster wants more detailed information, please would (s)he
contact me via e-mail.  My apologies for cluttering the net.

Robert_S
-- 
Robert Stanley - Cognos Incorporated: P.O. Box 9707, 3755 Riverside Drive
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