The Columbia Distribution Company, headquartered in Columbus, requested that the Research Department design and build an expert system to design regulator stations. A regulator station is a devise that reduces the pressure of gas. The station is needed up steam of the residential customers to reduce the pressure of the gas to that which can be use by their furnaces. A regulator allows the company to have high pressure pipeline, which can hold significantly more gas than a lower pressure pipeline, closer to the customer. The Distribution Company had one man who was an expert in the design and I was given full access to him whenever he has time to talk to me.

I would talk to the expert and he would tell me how he designs a regulator station. I would take the information back to my office and work on the expert system. This involved simulating the expert's logic by constructing IF-THEN statements using the QUICKBASIC programming language.

The project, like the glycol dehydration expert system, was too large to use in a current expert system shell, a program for developing an application. Since personal computers (PC) were now commonly available I decided to develop the expert system with QUICKBASIC using IF-THEN statements and other QUICKBASIC statements. The program would easily put on a floppy disk for easy access by anyone.

When I had the current information in the program I would take it back to him to see if what I had done so far was correct. This process would continue on a daily basis or every few days if he was busy doing his normal job.

The expert system designed a regulator station given many variable such as:

• inlet pressure
• outlet pressure
• component prices

that determined the best parts by price. This project was a complete success and was a fitting ending project for my 23 year career at Columbia Gas System. Unfortunately, the final report that detailed the project and the resulting computer program was one of the few reports that I did not, for some reason, retain a copy for my personal use. I retired in July, 1991 and have never looked back.