Standards,Codes of Practice and Expert Systems

Abstract

Many engineering design problems require reference to standards or codes of practice to ensure that acceptable safety and performance criteria are met. Extracting relevant data from such documents can, however, be a problem for the unfamiliar user. The use of expert systems to guide the retrieval of information from standards and codes of practice is proposed as a means of alleviating this problem.

Following a brief introduction to expert system techniques, a tool developed by the authors for building expert system guides to standards and codes of practice is described. The steps involved in encoding the knowledge contained in an arbitrarily chosen standard are illustrated. Finally, a typical consultation illustrates the use of the expert system guide to the standard.