CATS-1: rules for repairing locomotives
In July 1983 General Electric's research centre delivered to the company's Locomotive Operation CATS-1, the first field prototype of DELTA, an expert system that troubleshoots diesel-electric locomotives in running repair shops and suggests repair procedures to the maintenance staff. About 530 rules (330 for troubleshooting, 200 for help) ran in FORTH on a PDP 11/23 minicomputer.
Why it matters
An expert system was taken out of the laboratory into a repair shop on a small machine, not on the research centre's large computer. Its rules, the paper says, partially represent the knowledge of a senior field service engineer, so one specialist's experience was to reach repair staff without it.
The paper by Piero Bonissone and Harold Johnson of General Electric Corporate Research and Development (Schenectady) was read in the proceedings of the US Joint Services Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Maintenance, held at Boulder on 4-6 October 1983 and published in June 1984. The system diagnoses multiple problems at once and shows text, CAD drawings or repair sequences from a video disk. At the time of the paper the prototype was under field evaluation; over the next six months it was to be tested in service and then its knowledge base expanded to about 1,200 rules. What the record does not claim: any accuracy or savings, which the paper does not give; it is the developer's own description, and no second source was found. That the paper appeared at IJCAI-83: it is not in the contents of those proceedings.