Conceptual design of biomass-fired cogeneration plant through a knowledge-based system

Industries such as sugar/ethanol and paper/pulp generate large amount of biomass as by-products that must be properly handled to avoid environmental damage. A synergetic alternative to address this issue is to use the residual biomass as fuel in a cogeneration plant. In this work, it is presented the development of a knowledge-based system for conceptual design of biomass cogeneration plants. Elicitation from experts and technical literature provides knowledge for the base. A knowledge representation scheme composed of rules, object-oriented and semantic nets because it is flexible enough to cope with future knowledge base expansion. For rapid prototyping, a shell is used to implement the knowledge base. As a result, the system is able to quickly provide high quality conceptual solutions of biomass-fired cogeneration plants to support the designer in his/her decision making.