Knowledge-based systems for energy conservation programs

Given the big number of small and medium sized enterprises, it is argued that it would be of great benefit to implement an energy conservation program in this kind of enterprise. This program should focus on design as well as simple maintenance and servicing measures, and should be based on the practical knowledge of energy experts, who would diagnose every case and prescribe the pertinent recommendations. An economic way to implement this energy saving program would be to capture the corresponding expertise from the human experts into an expert system. In this paper a selection of three expert systems for energy conservation programs, developed at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the National Autonomous University of Mexico is described, and its results as means to save energy are discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.