The Kelly System - A Dam Surveillance Expert System

Abstract Only - The Southern California Edison Company, an investor owned utility, operates 33 major dams in the State of California. The Edison Company has been care­fully implementing an extensive monitoring program since the dams were con­structed, even prior to the advent of Government Regulation.
For the past 20 years, this program has been the sole responsibility of Mr. Tom Kelly, a Senior Engineer for Edison. As Tom is now in his mid-fifties, Edison decided to develop an Expert System in an attempt to capture and preserve Tom's expertise and experience with the dams. Edison contracted Texas Instruments to develop the program on a special Lisp computer called the Ex­plorer. The initial program was an expert system for the Vermillion Dam, one of the largest and most heavily instrumented within the Edison System. Edison also trained their own in-house knowledge engineer for maintenance of the system and for the future expansion to other dams.
This paper is an overview of the features, development and design of the Ex­pert System, which was named the Kelly System, after the Edison expert.
Artificial Intelligence (Al) programming techniques were used to represent the darn and capture some of Torn Kelly's expertise and historical knowledge. The program uses a menu driven interface with rnouseable icons and keyboard availability for interactive sessions with the user and easy access to historical data. There is also extensive use of graphics which provide visual representations of plans, cross-sections, diagrams, graphs, instrument locations, and animated reservoir and phreatic levels. The system has the inferential capability to warn the user when the instrument readings are beyond a designated tolerance and also to provide diagnoses and recommendations when seepage problems are en­
countered.