Expert Systems Applications in Construction Management and Engineering

Abstract

Because of their characteristic attributes of combining factual knowledge with judgment, being able to handle incomplete and uncertain data, and communicating with their users in the natural language, expert systems have a special appeal for the construction profession. In spite of this appeal, there are currently very few operational expert systems in the field of construction. One reason for this may be a lack of awareness by the industry as to what expert systems currently exist, what their capabilities are, and who their developers are. Presenting this information to the potential users in an easily scannable format is one of the objectives of this paper. A second objective of this effort is to present the characteristics of the state‐of‐the‐art expert systems to researchers and expert‐system‐developing institutions. This information will help them in making a choice of the most appropriate tools and trigger communication between developers working in similar domains. This paper has listed 37 expert‐system applications in the field of construction management and engineering. Of these, seven are operational, 14 exist as operational prototypes, and 16 are at the developmental stage. A majority of the expert systems developed so far are available on microcomputers, have the rule‐based knowledge‐representation scheme and are implemented using commercial expert‐system shells.