MINERVA superseeded IF/Prolog.
Please see
http://www.ifcomputer.co.jp/MINERVA
for details.
We discontinued to sell IF/Prolog Dec 31. 2003.
For current customers, we continue to provide
professional support for IF/Prolog until Dec 31, 2008.
Toda Construction Co., Ltd asked TEAC and IF Computer to develop
a Real Time Expert System to monitor the civil enginering process
of tunnel excavation using the Pressurized Slurry Shield Tunnelling method.
The system was build in order to increase the safety of drilling
operations for very large diameter tunnels. One target site is the
Tokyo Bay Tunnel project linking Kawasaki and Chiba. This site is
14 meters in diameter, one of the largest under construction today.
During shield-tunneling with the pressurized slurry shield tunneling method
in large cities, which is heavily used in metropolitan areas, safety
control is a high-priority concern. Under the conditions of high depth,
high water pressure, wide shield diameter (more than 10m), only highly
reliable monitoring and data management at the construction site can
assure safety.
Usually very experienced operators continuously monitor sensor data
to recognize trends that may require preventive action or
corrective adjustments to the drilling parameters.
Toda Construction recognized the potential of automatic monitoring
to relief operator stress, to increase reliability, and to document
both operator expertise and drilling processes.
The expert system receives a large amount of sensor data,
such as slurry pressure, pump speeds, material flows: about 200
analog and digital data points every 2 seconds.
The system uses this raw information together with built-in expert
knowledge to analyse the ongoing process, predict possible trouble,
infer reasons of arising problems and suggests
the most suitable action or countermeasure.
The normal turnaround time for a full inference cycle is 10 about seconds.
Inference method employed is a combination of forward chaining and
expectation driven verification, i.e. local mixed inference.
As IF/Prolog is used for all program modules except for the
sensor data acquisition, which employs the C langauge.
Business Partner: TEAC Corporation (Sensor Systems)
Hardware: Hewlett-Packard
Software: IF/Prolog, C, UNIX
 Partial view of raw data and evaluation result
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