A Real-time Expert System Environment for on-line
Operational Control and Decision Support Applications

RTXPS is a real-time expert system environment designed for on-line dynamic decision support, mission critical command, control and communication tasks such as emergency management for technological and environmental hazards, including early warning for events such as floods, toxic or oil spills, tsunamis, land slides, etc. complex control and assessment tasks, including coordination of first response, recovery, restoration and clean-up operations, related teaching and training applications. RTXPS can be configured to implement any checklist, questionnaire or operating manual based procedure or protocol. It offers context sensitive support functions based on Artificial Intelligence technology, that can handle the most demanding dynamic situations in distributed client-server environments, with several parallel action threads. RTXPS provides extensive support and assistance to the operator, and keeps complete real-time logs for quality control. Setting and querying of timers or the pending of ACTIONS provide additional features for real-time control. RTXPS is based on a time-aware forward chaining inference engine, that processes context sensitive

Production Rules that manage the dynamic problem knowledge base and trigger ACTIONS. ACTIONS are communicated to the operator in hypertext format, and can automatically trigger a wide range of functions including data entry and display, an embedded backward-chaining expert system, and complex simulation and optimisation modeling GIS applications. Support of extensive documentation, logging, reporting and external communication functions such as automatic compilation and sending of e-mail or fax messages as well as the automatic generation and update of web pages for public information access are important features of the system. RTXPS can also link to on-line monitoring and data acquisition systems that can provide real-time intelligence and feed-back from the field; this can be used not only to update the problem context dynamically, but also for the re-calibration of dynamic forecasting models. RTXPS uses a simple near-natural language syntax for its Rules, ACTIONS and Descriptors, the variables that the Rules operate on. An intuitive SCRIPT language supports the efficient development of the Knowledge Base for a new application. On-line Manuals

Application Examples

• RTXPS is the core DSS component of RiskWare, a decision support system for technological risk management, designed for risk assessment, risk management, and risk training.

• RTXPS in an extended implementation is the basis of our CourseWare training system, developed in the A-TEAM advanced technical training system. The framework can also be used to guide users through other complex tasks such as the EIAxpert system for screening level EIA.

• RTXPS has been implemented as the overall framework for SIGRIC, the Sistema di Gestione Rischio Chimico for the Provincial Authorities of Pisa in the Regione Toscana, Italy.

• RTXPS is also the core DSS component of HITERM, High-Performance Computing for Technological Risk Management, an Esprit HPCN project with case study applications in Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland.

Various editors support the man-machine dialog and data acquisition for the inference engine

RTXPS controls a range of dynamic simulation models that feed their results into the expert system

Communication functions range from polling remote sensors and access to remote data bases to automatic fax messages