INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE AND EXPERT SYSTEMS

Artificial Intelligence is presently experiencing a rapid growth in various areas of economy, especially industry. This paper presents an overview of this field with an emphasis on the domain of knowledge-based expert systems. The paper is organized as follows: - general presentation of artificial intelligence: definition, main historical phases, basic characteristics and domains of applications (problem solving, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, expert systems), - problem solving techniques: graph search methods, problem reduction, - basics of knowledge engineering: principles of knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation techniques, reasoning modes, - expert systems: main features, general architectures, types of problems tackled by expert systems, application fields, development phases and tools. We conclude with a brief survey of present advanced research themes of Al including second generation expert systems and multi-agent architectures.