Expert Systems to Assist Analytical Chemistry: Troubleshooting and Plausibility Testing in Ion Chromatography
An expert system for automated troubleshooting and plausibility testing in ion chromatography is introduced. The program is able to detect some major problems in the chromatograms. First it evaluates the incoming data to get the retention time, baseline drift and noise, the peakshape and other criteria. Based on this information conclusions are drawn whether an analysis is formally correct or not. Even more problems can be solved depending on the inputs of the users. The expert system is able to deal with many standard problems (523 are implemented). To evaluate the plausibility of the data the system uses known information about the sample (analytes and concentrations) to calculate ranges of credible results. The troubleshooting routines lead to at least 90% correct conclusions. The plausibility check needs many informations for the inference process, it succeeds best with routine problems.