RELIABILITY KNOWLEDGE AND FRACTAL EVALUATION OF CHAOS

Fractal analysis has been used for the study of chaos in a number of two or three dimensional-physical systems. Its possible role in the evaluation of reliability knowledge bases is studied in this paper. The difficulty in applying fractal analysis to knowledge bases is in finding a generic notion of scale which may be applicable to both numerical and symbolic data. We present here some notions of scale and of detail in relation to a set of fuzzy conditional statements. The only precondition for the application of fractal analysis is an ability to distinguish between specific and general knowledge items. A realistic case study (control valves) is presented in details.