Quantitative knowledge based approach for preliminary design of tall buildings

A knowledge based expert system for the preliminary design of tall buildings has been developed. The system implementation is based on the integration of symbolic and numerical processing. A domain independent shell has been employed in the expert system development and verification. The rule based knowledge base of the system includes a set of IF/THEN rules that provide the inference mechanism with the information needed in the judgemental process. A numerical algorithm is introduced to help quantify the decision making process by relating the confidence factors for each possible solution to a numerical quantity defined as the virtual number of stories. The judgemental process is coupled with the numerical algorithm through the external program facility provided in the expert system development shell.