Quality Assurance/Quality Control in Construction: Expert Systems Development for Multilevel Experienced Users

摘要

Within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) military construction program, a limited number of quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) personnel are responsible for an increasingly large workload involving many more complex practices than found in traditional construction. To ensure the continued quality of military facilities, several approaches are being considered, including automation. Expert systems technology in particular shows great promise in creating tools to assist QA/QC elements. Past development of expert systems has shown that the user must become involved early in the process to ensure suitable system performance. However, in developing some systems, the user is not known and the system cannot be tailored for a particular level of domain knowledge. When this situation occurs, it is necessary to provide flexibility in a system to handle users with differing levels of knowledge about the domain. Incorporating this flexibility into an expert system is a major problem in current expert system development and different approaches have been tried to deal with the problem. This report describes the development of decision models to allow flexibility in handling multilevel user knowledge about a specific domain. These models can be implemented in many different commercially available shells to supplement the available options and provide a more flexible interface for expert system users. (sdw)