Japan will begin testing an artificial intelligence-assisted system next fiscal year to automatically detect and track suspicious foreign vessels in its territorial waters, Japan Coast Guard officials said. It is hoped the system will help ease the burden on maritime law-enforcement operations as Japan faces an increase in intrusions into its waters and illegal activities in its exclusive economic zone, particularly by Chinese vessels, they said. The AI-based integrated system, which will monitor satellite data, will enable early detection and prediction of intrusions by analyzing ships' navigation data such as speed, location and direction. The system is expected to have the capability to process data from multiple ships at once, they said. Once a suspicious ship is detected, the coast guard will dispatch vessels.

It may be argued that this, in principle, is a more realistic approach because it addresses, rather than finesses, the problem of incomplete information in the knowledge base. On the other hand, the Dempster-Shafer theory provides a basis-at least at present-for only a small subset of the rules of combination which are needed for inferencing in expert systems. In particular, the theory does not address the issue of chaining, nor does it come to grips with the fuzziness of probabilities and certainty factors. Thus, although the theory is certainly a step in the right direction, for it provides a framework for dealing with granular data, it does require a great deal of further development to become a broadly useful tool for the management of uncertainty in expert systems. Although not easy to understand, Shafer's book contains a wealth of significant results, and is a must for anyone who wants to do serious research on problems relating to the rules of combination of evidence in expert systems. Indeed, there is no doubt that, in the years to come, the Dempster-Shafer theory and its extensions will become an integral part of the theory of such systems and will certainly occupy an important place in knowledge engineering and related fields.