Case-Based Reasoning System for Modeling Infrastructure Deterioration

Abstract

Deterioration models are essential components of infrastructure management systems (IMSs) because they predict the future condition of infrastructure facilities and consequently assist in optimizing maintenance decisions. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is proposed to generate deterioration models that benefit from the large amount of facility data stored in IMS databases and updated on a regular basis. CBRMID (CBR for modeling infrastructure deterioration) is a new CBR system developed to satisfy the special requirements of modeling infrastructure deterioration and to provide government agencies with practical, accurate, and versatile deterioration models. CBRMID is required to support (1) hierarchial decomposition of infrastructure facilities; (2) representation of facility component interactions; (3) versatility and extensibility of case and knowledge representation; (4) data reusing and sharing; (5) representation of time-dependent data; and (6) fuzziness of retrieval knowledge. In this paper, the architecture of CBRMID is described in terms of case representation, case retrieval, case adaptation, and case accumulation. An application example generated using CBRMID is also presented.