Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications - digital archive 

Abstract

Reliability and safety knowledge is very sparse, Its realistic and objective application is nearly impossible. Additional knowledge is needed to increase the reasoning power of reliability and safety knowledge bases. The conventional fractal analysis has been used for the study of chaos in physical systems. Its possible role in the evaluation of reliability/safety knowledge bases is studied in this paper. The only precondition for the application of fractal analysis is an ability to distinguish between specific and general knowledge items. This enables us to detect a level of inconsistency between mostly subjective additional knowledge items and the existing knowledge bases. The fractal analysis can characterise the knowledge base as one integrated complex. However, knowledge acquisition requires "local" evaluations as well. Therefore a discriminative analysis is used. A realistic man-machine dialogue (an evaluation of the mean time between failures of control valves) supported by the fractal and/or discriminative analysis is presented