| The beneficial utilization of FGD wastes has not received the level of attention from highway departments and utility companies that it should, given the huge amount of material presently being generated. This is due in large measure to the lack of knowledge of the properties of the material, limited knowledge of the behavior of the material in engineered structures, and the absence of procedures to guide engineers to safe, economical designs.;To overcome these difficulties, an intelligent decision support system, IDSSHED, that systematically integrates the required knowledge of material properties and design for FGD-based highway embankments was created. This system combines the components of both a decision support system and an expert system. The proposed model consists of six components: knowledge base, inference engine, user interface, data base subsystem, numerical processing subsystem, and graphical design subsystem. The IDSSHED developed a systematic knowledge acquisition process to collect the scattered knowledge. Object-oriented programming was selected as knowledge representation method. The system makes possible the efficient implementation of decision making tasks from the geotechnical engineering field in the design of structural fills utilizing coal combustion by-products. This system is a user-friendly computer program which encodes expert experiences, heuristic judgments, and numerical calculations obtained from analytical programs. The system also summarizes large volumes of data and transfers visible data format using graphical and tabular data preparation to users. Thus, the system enhances the productivity of the decision maker.;The IDSSHED was evaluated by three levels of quality control procedures: testing, validation, and case study of an implementation. Completeness, efficiency, user-friendliness, and usability were evaluated by both participating and non-participating experts. |
