The Design Of Anti-Sulfate Erosion Expert System In Concrete (ASEES)

Expert Systems have proven to be useful tools to aid the decision-making process for the construction industry.Expert systems use rules to represent experts, reasoning in solving problems. The rules are based on knowledge about methods and the problem domain. To acquire knowledge for an expert system, one should rely on a variety of sources, such as textbooks, research papers, interviews, surveys.Expert systems should be easy to use, incorporate the best available knowledge, and reveal the reasoning behind the recommendations they make.This theses is the result of a survey of expert/knowledge based systems applications and development methods related to concrete design.The main topics include:1) An introduction to expert systems, it's components, characteristics, inference strategy methods, knowledge representations, and general stages in the development of an expert system.2) Domains, applications with some examples for expert systems.3) The initial step in the development of Anti-Sulfate Erosion Expert system in concrete (ASEES). Which addresses two topics:a) The selection of concrete materials design, which is designed to serve as a tool for concrete specifiers.b) Diagnosis and repairment the faults occurred during the mixing process. This subsystem uses information from the user to diagnosis of failures which can assist the inspector or engineer to:- identifying the failures during the mixing process.- diagnosing the cause and position of the failures.- produces conclusions and recommendations (The recommendations are based on the cause and position of the failure).