Practice

SPIRIT Applications

Overview

Subsequently you will find applications of SPIRIT for practitioners, at which they will be presented here only briefly. For further information please read selected papers..



Credit-Worthiness

Especially for consumer credits, a bank official is supported at best by scoring procedures when making decisions about a client's credit-worthiness.
Recently, banks show also interest in knowledge based systems which can analyze the characteristic patterns of a credit-applicant and so have the ability to support the analyst's final decision.
With SPIRIT and the dialogue component ANALYST, a probabilistic expert system is at your disposal, which - after a learning phase - is able to make the »right« decision on the basis of past credit cases and the banks' credit lines.

Inquiry Evaluation for Business to Business Projects

Until the final signature of a contract concerning a turnkey project or a large-scale unit business, months or even years pass, in which the potential buyer asks various suppliers to make their tenders.
For the offering enterprise preparing such tenders does not only imply high costs but also significant risks, since only about each tenth tender may be successful.
Costs of such offers, in average amount to 5% of the whole project, which might mean millions of dollars.
The evaluation process of such an inquiry by SPIRIT proceeds in two steps. First the system checks general conditions in a pre-selection phase and then analyzes chances and risks of the concrete project.
Under a project with an important German producer of industrial facilities, the advantages of the program SPIRIT were tested in comparison with conventional scoring models.

Diagnosis in Chinese Medicine

Similar to western medicine, the entire recognition of a disease is also the main challenge to Chinese medicine. A central role plays the syndrome, in Chinese Zheng. Syndromes in Chinese medicine involve the origin, place, properties and symptoms of a disease. The basis for a dialectic diagnosis are such syndromes, which Chinese medicine divides into five groups:



The mutual influence of all syndrome-diagnostics is rather complicated. So we decided to analyze one of them, "the eight guide principles", and model it in a knowledge base. The eight guide principles are yin/yang, surface/inside, cold/heat and emptiness/abundance, which are dialectic in pairs.
A special problem that occurs during the formulation of the very large number of rules is that there might be inconsistencies in the rules. Thus how to handle such inconsistencies is currently one of the research fields at our department.
For further information about this subject please download the respective papers.