Expert Knowledge Base Development for an Industrial Energy Assessment System

Industrial energy management is critical to achieve and monitor industrial energy efficiency. Decision support systems enable energy managers to form effective strategies to increase profitability by eliminating wasteful practices. A well formulated knowledge base is essential for a decision support system to function. Expert knowledge must be acquired and coded into a knowledge base to be accessible to a decision support system. The primary objective is to devise a methodology to extract expert knowledge acquired through field work or archived in manually generated energy analysis reports. Once the knowledge is extracted it can be codified and stored in a knowledge base that is validated to be usable by an energy management assistant decision support system. The acquisition and codification method is demonstrated by its implementation in the REACTOR energy management software system.