AN EXPERT SYSTEMS-APPROACH TO TRANSDUCER SELECTION AND DEPLOYMENT

Expert systems, a topic of considerable recent interest, find application to those problems within a relatively narrow domain and involving a large degree of judgement, experience and intuition. In this paper, we address such a problem type, the selection and deployment of transducers to either acoustic or electromagnetic array slot positions. While an inherently combinatorically explosive problem, experienced design engineers have been able to develop heuristic rules so as to derive reasonably adequate development schemes - at least for problems of a relatively small scale. In this paper, we describe the development of a hybrid expert system approach to this problem that extends to even larger and more complex problems of transducer deployment - an approach verified on actual hardware.