Traditional
expert systems for fault diagnosis have a bottleneck in knowledge
acquisition, and have limitations in knowledge representation and reasoning. A
new expert system shell for fault diagnosis is presented in
this paper to develop multiple knowledge models (object model, rules,
neural network, case-base and diagnose models) hierarchically based on multiple
knowledge. The structure of the expert system shell and the
knowledge representation of multiple models are described. Diagnostic algorithms
are presented for automatic modeling and hierarchical reasoning. It will
be shown that the expert system shell is very effective
in building diagnostic expert systems.