Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1991

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Chemical Engineering

Major Professor

Frederick Weber

Committee Members

Robert Counce, Carl Thomas, Robert Uhrig

Abstract

Management of hazardous chemical waste is an increasing problem both for the companies that generate the wastes and for communities that eventually experience the consequences of the management decisions. Thus, there are both social and political aspects to the problem. An expert system was developed to select the "best" waste treatment alternatives. The expert system includes both the social and political aspects and the technical and economical aspects. It includes two different knowledge bases: one for the economical and technical and another for the social and political aspects. This expert system was developed on an IBM personal computer. The artificial intelligence language Turbo Prolog was used to develop this expert system. The pulp and paper industry was the sample problem for developing this expert system. Three multicriteria decision making methods were used to analyze the results from the panel of experts; average method, standard deviation method, and modified fuzzy logic method. The results obtained from both standard deviation method and modified fuzzy logic method are in good agreement. A computer program was written in C to do the economic analysis for each available waste treatment alternatives and the analysis of the results from the panel of experts. This program was linked with Prolog program. The expert system is a complete consultation package for the waste management decision maker. In addition, applying the expert system to different industries only requires the development of two new knowledge bases. The expert system developed in this study shows it is possible to develop an expert system at the microcomputer level. Turbo Prolog is a valuable tool for development since it can easily interact with the user to link with external routines written in C, to retrieve data from external data bases, to display textual information, and to display graphics information. In addition, the expert system is an executable program with the advantage that the end user does not need to purchase Turbo Prolog.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS