DEVELOPMENT OF AN EXPERT SYSTEM FOR PAVEMENT REHABILITATION DECISION-MAKING

In recent years, continued deterioration of the nation's highway infrastructure has led to increased emphasis on pavement rehabilitation, with national annual expenditures of billions of dollars. The nature of the analysis and design process suggests that a new technological approach, knowledge-based or expert systems, could play an important role in addressing pavement rehabilitation problems and needs. This paper provides an overview of expert system characteristics, discusses the pavement rehabilitation analysis and design process, and describes a prototype, microcomputer-based, surface condition expert system, SCEPTRE 1.1, for flexible pavement rehabilitation. Based on user inputs, and a knowledge-base constructed from several human experts, the system can deduce a set of feasible project-level rehabilitation strategies, for subsequent detaied analysis and design. The system can also readily explain its reasoning and conclusions, and is easily modified. It can therefore make its body of specialized knowledge accessible to a much broader range of potential engineering users.