On the Robustness of Belief-Rule-Based Expert Systems

Belief rule base (BRB) expert system has been widely used in complex system modeling. Robustness is crucial to the modeling performance and safety of BRB. For a better understanding and utility of BRB, there is thereby an urgent need to know what kind of influence each part of BRB may have when the disturbance occurs. Aiming at this, a more comprehensive analysis of BRB robustness is conducted in this article. First, the Lipschitz condition for BRB is defined. With the definitions, a new robustness analysis method of BRB is proposed, which is conducted from four aspects: 1) the input transformation; 2) the matching degree calculation; 3) the matching degree normalization; and 4) the rule aggregation. Moreover, five guidelines for BRB construction are proposed by analyzing its robustness, which can offer a practical guide for users to establish, adjust, and improve the BRB model for specific applications. The robustness analysis of the BRB expert system for the relay health-state evaluation is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

I. Introduction

To better simulate, analyze, understand, and forecast the real-world system, many models have been applied in system modeling. In engineering practice, gray-box models can make a great balance between modeling accuracy and model interpretability [1]. For this reason, they are widely used in safety-sensitive tasks, such as medical decision making [2], and spacecraft health management [3].