Safety is a major concern for tunnel operators. Local authorities responsible for tunnel facilities are concerned with developing restrictions for hazardous materials passing through the facility that will reduce the risk of death and injury, to an extent that these restrictions do not burden commerce unnecessarily. Hazardous material regulatory controls for tunnels are extensive, detailed, and subject to constant changes. The general lack of expertise in tunnel personnel and the lack of a scientific basis leading to the development of these regulations have created problems to local tunnel authorities when updating the restrictions, or when faced with new materials introduced by the industry. Traditionally, most regulatory restrictions enforced both at the federal and the local level are based exclusively on subjective estimation by a panel of experts and on political influence. Experts, however, are not readily available and are expensive to maintain. The need for immediate decisions has constrained tunnel operators to rely on their own intuition in addressing real time transport safety problems in tunnel facility. To address some of these problems, this research investigates the application of knowledge engineering tools to develop a consultative regulatory control system. Specifically, this study presents a structural framework for developing a knowledge-based expert system as an aid to decision-making in tunnel transport safety. The regulatory problem is modeled as a classification type of problem, which lends itself neatly to an expert system application. Heuristic problem solver which is commonly used in solving classification problem involves the systematic matching of the attributes of an unknown entity to a set of pre-defined solutions. For this study's application, the regulatory groupings inherent in existing tunnel regulations are the basis for developing the solution space. The computer program developed uses knowledge which specifies the appropriate regulation applicable to a new commodity based on the material's physical and chemical properties. / M.S.

The FOster Care Expert System (FOCES) was developed to provide advice to social workers of the Roanoke City Department of Social Services who must select foster care homes for children who cannot remain with their own families. It was implemented using the General pUrpose Expert Shell System (GUESS) and Horn Clause Prolog. The system's design was greatly influenced by unique features of the problem domain. Among the key concerns were: unresolved questions within the social work profession about foster home selection and evaluation, serious methodological and philosophical difficulties associated with defining a good "person-environment fit", and the volatile, free-form narrative nature of the information maintained by social services agencies about children and homes. "Traditional" approaches to knowledge acquisition and representation adopted by developers of expert systems were of limited use. Adaptation of extended "p-norm" Boolean queries previously used in information retrieval work simplified the knowledge representation and matching tasks for this human services application. Evaluation of FOCES' performance, using a small database of children and homes, has shown that the system can select appropriate foster care placements at least as well as some experienced social workers. / Master of Science

Expert systems are very useful and probably the most fruitful products of applied artificial intelligence. Expert systems, however, are very· expensive to develop. Powerful construction tools are indispensable to construct, modify and maintain a practical expert system. GUESS/l is a domain-independent expert systems shell that captures and enhances the strengths of its predecessors while at the same time overcoming.their limitations. GUESS/l gives a strong emphasis on human engineering, language generality, diversity of data representation and control structures, programming and run-time environment, database construction facilities and security, and many other aspects that are related to the ease of development and maintenance of expert systems. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study is to implement the advantages of the relatively new field of expert systems to robot kinematics. The research presented in this thesis illustrates the progress in combining the two fields. An expert system used to solve the kinematic equations of general purpose robots is presented along with some examples. / Master of Science

Congestion due to traffic accidents and incidents can be reduced through effective freeway incident management. However, this is plagued by a number of problems and requires a high level of expertise and coordination among the involved personnel. The ill-structured nature of the problem, constantly changing conditions, the number of agencies involved, and the lack of current information often cause errors in decision and response. Under these conditions, there is need for computer based support tools to provide the required decision and information support and aid the entire process by improving coordination and communication. This study focuses on addressing this issue through the development of an Expert-GIS system which integrates the powerful spatial data handling capabilities of a Geographic Information System with the rule based reasoning logic of an Expert System. The system is designed as a Group Decision Support System that provides the required support for both the substance of the problem (decisions) and the agency level interactions that take place. The ability to support the process of response is modeled using a blackboard architecture for the system. The prototype developed fully integrates the software environments of Arc/Info and Nexpert-Object and presents a unified interface, from where different incident management functions can be accessed. A complete spatial database was designed for the Fairfax County in Northern Virginia as a part of this development effort. Decision support is provided through a set of six integrated modules - incident detection and verification, preliminary response, duration estimation, delay calculation, final response plan and diversion planning, and recovery. Coordination and communication were enhanced by ensuring the uniformity of information at different locations using the system, and through a messaging mechanism that informed users about the current status of incident. The prototype system was developed for two hypothetical agencIes called the Traffic Management Center and The Police Control Center. Historical incident cases were use to test these systems and check the accuracy of the database and the rule base. Both the tests and the development effort showed a strong need for established sources of network information, that could be readily incorporated into the database. Given the fact that the system works with real network data, the next phase of research in should focus on the deployment of the system at test sites. User feedback obtained from these tests would then serve as a basis for future enhancements. / Master of Science

Although widely recognized in the research community as one of the most accurate non-destructive methods for the determination of residual stress in polycrystalline structural materials, X-ray diffraction has not been widely adopted in the field. This is partly due to the fact that such measurements require, most often, a well-trained user with knowledge in both materials and mechanical sciences in addition to the specific know-how of the instrument. We believe that computer assistance could contribute to the promotion of this technique by increasing the productivity and accuracy of these measurements. We have developed a prototype of an expert system, using Nexpert Object's shell, to assist a non-trained operator in the validation and interpretation of X-ray diffraction residual stress data. The present work describes this prototype which has been designed to confirm the feasibility of the concept. Its knowledge base contains relevant examples of the rules necessary for data validation. The prototype has also validated most of the concepts required for the implementation of a full-scaled version by evaluating all of the major technical features such as graphics representation, external routine calls, and databases access. We have implemented significant rules to validate an experiment, link our expert system with a database management system, develop a superset of data able to receive output from any existing X-ray machine, and are working with a statistical pattern recognition software to discriminate between various d-vs-sin²Psi curves, to classify our data. / Master of Science

Increased complexity of constructed facilities, owners’ changing needs and international competition have created strong demands for advanced construction technology. Recent developments in computer technologies provide the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry with significant potential for innovation. However, the adoption of state of-the-art computer technologies by a majority of AEC firms faces many hurdles. The objective of this research is the development of methodologies for accelerating the adoption of Expert Systems (ES) technology by the AEC industry. This is accomplished with the development of a Technology Transfer (T²) model for ES. The T² model has been based on the models of innovation developed by Rogers, Shaffer, and Tatum, as well as on case Studies of ES adoption by several organizations. The ES T² model has focused on the following issues: 1) the stages of the T² process and the managerial actions required for successful adoption of ES technology; 2) the economical, technological and organizational factors affecting the T² process; and 3) alternative strategies that managers can deploy to successfully transfer the technology to their firm. The T² model provides a useful framework that can significantly enhance managers’ ability to expedite the transfer of ES technology in the AEC industry. / Master of Science

Scheduling is one of the most important functions in a factory and it is determining when and with what resources jobs should be accomplished. An important factor that affects the scheduling of jobs is the dynamic variation of factory status. Existing computer based scheduling systems do not address the need of making effective decisions dynamically with the variations in factory status. Traditionally, Operations Research techniques have provided an effective tool in solving manufacturing planning problems. But these methods have not been able to effectively address real time control problems in the manufacturing environment. To address some of these problems, this research investigates applying an expert system approach to develop an interactive real time dynamic scheduling system. Specifically, a knowledge base structure is developed and applied to a case study representing a two stage production system. A Blackboard concept has been utilized to organize and maintain the dynamic data base. The major knowledge representation schemes used in the system include, frame structures, relational tables, and production rules. The system was tested on a case study, by conducting a sample interactive session on a set of simulated dynamic situations. The test demonstrated the viability of implementing knowledge based systems for dynamic scheduling at the operational level of a plant. / Master of Science

The use of computers in the area of design and manufacturing is commonplace in industry. Many companies are turning to custom designed in-house software to surpass the competition. A growing number are developing knowledge-based expert systems to capture the knowledge of expertise of employees before they retire. The use of traditional artificial intelligence languages can be cumbersome to engineers who are usually familiar with traditional languages such as FORTRAN and C. The use of expert systems shells can often hinder the customization of an expert system due to limitations of the shell. An alternate approach to these methods is the use of an object-oriented framework that facilitates the creation of customized expert systems. This framework, called the Expert Consultation Environment, alleviates the programming problems of expert system development and allows the engineer to concentrate on knowledge acquisition. This thesis describes the design of the rule classes needed by the framework. These are the base Rule class, the Equation Rule class, the Control Rule class, the Constraint Rule class and the Heuristic Rule Class. Also presented, is the development of a methodology used in creating an expert system with the framework. A prototype expert system developed using the framework for parametric, multi-disciplinary, conceptual design of aircraft is described. / Master of Science

Expert systems are being used more daily in chemical engineering. This work continues the development of an EXpert system for SEParation flowsheet synthesis named EXSEP. Written in Prolog, it can generate flowsheets for four multicomponent separations: distillation, absorption, stripping and liquid-liquid extraction. For these separations, we describe a large collection of heuristics (or rules) that are used for flowsheet synthesis. EXSEP uses several of these heuristics and the Kremser equation to test the thermodynamic feasibility of separation tasks. EXSEP requires only basic input data such as the expected component flow rates in each product and the component K-values. With those data, EXSEP searches for the sets of the number of theoretical stages, solvent flow rate, and component-recovery ratios that characterize a number of feasible and economical flowsheets. The use of the component assignment matrix (CAM) combined with Prolog list processing makes EXSEP very fast (several seconds) to generate solutions. We test EXSEP with several examples of industrial separation processes and compare the results with the literature. We also compare EXSEP results with rigorous simulations using commercial CAD software (e.g., DESIGN II). In most cases, EXSEP gives very similar and even better flowsheets. However, EXSEP is limited to dilute solvent-based separations and cannot solve problems where the major feed component is also the solvent (e.g. sour-water steam stripper). The development of EXSEP on IBM-PC makes it very "user friendly". In the future, EXSEP should be expanded with additional modules such as extractive and azeotropic distillation, and bulk absorption. It should also include modules for separation method and solvent selections, which are great challenges in flowsheet synthesis. / Master of Science