ESCORT (Expert System for Complex Operations in Real Time) is a demonstration expert system for analyzing process plant data to identify control and instrumentation failures, and for providing the operator with advice on crisis avoidance and crisis handling. ESCORT operates on data taken once a second, and does not use the previous time history. The summary of the original ESCORT given in the present paper is too brief to provide the reader with an understanding of the system.

The present paper describes extensions to ESCORT to include reasoning about the dynamics of the plant and interactions between different parts of the plant. The new material incorporates rules dealing with causal reasoning about the process rather than just heuristic rules about individual control loops. The system’s current view of what is going on in the plant is represented on a hypothesis network, with each hypothesis representing some assertion that may be true, false, or unknown. The representations of the plant and the hypotheses are indicated, and a brief example of creation of a hypothesis network is given. The authors indicate that future work will be the incorporation of uncertainty.

Although the authors state that “the work has greatly enhanced ESCORT’s capabilities,” no details as to evaluation are given. There is no indication of the programming language or the hardware used. Because of the lack of detail, the reader can get only a glimmer of what the improved ESCORT really can do.