Laserjet Printer Troubleshooting Expert System

Abstract

This paper model an expert system called LAPTEX for troubleshooting LaserJet printers’ faults. Today, with the innumerable advances in information technologies, computerizing printer’s fault troubleshooting and identifying faults is far becoming so vital. Also, printers’ fault detection is a complicated process that requires a high level of expertise (formal or informal) and depending on the know-how of the technician, a printer could be abandoned for just a minor fault. Our objective is therefore, to develop an Expert System for troubleshooting a LaserJet printer’s faults. The Expert System comprises of a user interface, a rule-base, an inference engine, and a knowledge editor interface. The system is meant to computerize the maintenance, and repair process of LaserJet printers, and give a time-based assistance to those who are in need of instant help when the maintenance experts are not handy. The method of fact-finding called knowledge acquisition which is a knowledge-based approach to extract facts was adopted. The methodology follows the waterfall model of software development life cycle. Java programming language platform was used to implement this system while Net Bean was used to draw the user interface (UI) design.

Keywords: Expert System, LaserJet Printer, Knowledge-Base.