ChemReg: Using Case-Based Reasoning to Support Health and Safety Compliance in the Chemical Industry

Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., to support compliance with regulatory requirements for communicating health and safety information in the shipping and handling of chemical products. This article concentrates on one of the knowledge bases in this system: the case-based reasoner. The casebased reasoner addresses the issue of how proper communication of public health and safety information can be ensured while rapid and cost-effective product evaluation is allowed in the absence of actual hazard testing of the product. CHEMREG generates estimates of hazard data for new products from similar products using an existing relational database as a case library. Implementation of the case-based reasoner in rules and objects using a commercial knowledge-based system shell is described. Although some refinements remain, the performance of the case-based reasoner has met its design goals.