Expert system for operation optimization and control of cutter suction dredger

Manually controlled dredging process is of low production and poor efficiency. To raise production and to reduce unit cost, automatic control of dredging process is a desired solution to the problem. The automation of dredging operations has been actively researched by scholars all over the world for a couple of years. Based on the prior research results of dredging operations, an expert control system that is aimed to realize online operation optimization and automatic control of dredging process is introduced in this paper. Details on the problem to be dealt with and the expert system (ES) based solution are introduced; the focus of this paper is put on the architecture, knowledge presentation and inferential mechanism of the ES. An expert control software program is developed with C++. Based on the test platform constructed the performance of the ES is evaluated by comparison. Experiments show that the expert control scheme presented is capable of realizing automatic dredging process control with acceptable performance.