Expert systems are effective tools for automatically identifying energy efficiency potentials in manufacturing, thereby contributing significantly to global climate targets. These systems analyze energy data, pinpoint inefficiencies, and recommend optimizations to reduce energy consumption. Beyond systematic approaches for developing expert systems, there is a pressing need for simple and rapid software implementation solutions. Expert system shells, which facilitate the swift development and deployment of expert systems, are crucial tools in this process. They provide a template that simplifies the creation and integration of expert systems into existing manufacturing processes. This paper provides a comprehensive comparison of existing expert system shells regarding their suitability for improving energy efficiency, highlighting significant gaps and limitations. To address these deficiencies, we introduce a novel expert system shell, implemented in Jupyter Notebook, that provides a flexible and easily integrable solution for expert system development.

Expert Systems: Expert systems are the most used Artificial Intelligence tools. The expert system is software used in the activity areas in some applications to finding answers to questions presented by a user or another software. It can be used directly to support decisions in areas such as medical diagnostics, finance, or cyberspace. There are a variety of specialist systems for solutions to problems, from small technical diagnostic systems to complex, very large and sophisticated hybrid systems. Conceptually, an expert system includes a database of expert knowledge about a particular application area.

This paper presents an application of the Dempster-Shafer evidence combination scheme in building a rule based expert system shell for diagnostic reasoning. Domain knowledge is stored as rules with associated belief functions. The reasoning component uses a combination of forward and backward inferencing mechanisms to interact with the user in a mixed initiative format.

The annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is the largest and most important meeting of AI theoreticians and practitioners in the United States. This year, the conference was held in Seattle, Wash., and paid attendance was just under 5100. Last year's Philadelphia conference drew 5400. The drop in attendance was primarily the result of competition with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in Milan a few weeks after AAAI.