Applying AI to railway freight loading

摘要

It is difficult to allocate the freight cars and to determine how to load many kinds of goods into them. In order to improve efficiency, a knowledge-based system is developed and integrated into the existing railway management information system. This paper introduces the development of the system and the framework in which the expert system is integrated into MIS environments. Under the framework, the combination of logic programming technology and database technology provides us a practical way to solve the problems in many existing management information systems. Meanwhile, developing the expert system as a distributed application benefited both the organization and users. The existing centralized database management system was maintained, and the security and the control of the database were ensured. Users can obtain the performance of a workstation with the transparency of data location in a user-friendly environment. At last, the implementation of the Expert System of Railway Freight Loading (ESRFL) is discussed.