Developing a personal computer based expert system for radionuclide identification

Several expert system development tools are available for personal computers today. We have used one of the LISP-based high end tools for nearly two years in developing an expert system for identification of gamma sources. The system contains a radionuclide database of 2055 nuclides and 48000 gamma transitions with a knowledge base of about sixty rules. This application combines a LISP-based inference engine with database management and relatively heavy numerical calculations performed using C-language. The most important feature needed has been the possibility to use LISP and C together with the more advanced object oriented features of the development tool. Main difficulties have been long response times and the big amount (10-16 MB) of computer memory required