APPLICATION OF KNOWLEDGE BASED EXPERT SYSTEM IN STEEL BRIDGE MANAGEMENT

The maintenance and administration of existing civil engineering structures are becoming an important subject, and require experienced engineers with sufficient knowledge. A knowledge based expert system (KBES) may be effectively used in this field. Therefore, the authors have developed a KBES to select repairing and retrofitting methods for fatigue damage of steel bridges. First, as to knowledge acquisition, this study summarizes the basic concept of rough sets which have been drawing attention as a basic technology to handle rough knowledge included in observation results. They discuss the application method of the rough set theory in acquiring empirical knowledge immanent in observation data. Secondly, they build a KBES using case based reasoning to select the repair and retrofit methods of fatigue damage. This system consists of a case based database for the past cases, and four kinds of inference processes (retrieval, modification, restoration, and storing). The authors discuss the inference results obtained from this system by applying to the actual cases.