Design and design evaluation of railway plate girder bridges using knowledge based technique

Abstract

A knowledge based system is developed for design and design evaluation of railway plate girder bridges using computer language 'C'. The proposed system designs and evaluates the design of two types of railway plate girder bridges: through and deck. The user interface is developed in such a way that it is used to direct the overall design process. The expert knowledge is stored in the knowledge base, the inference process is driven by an inference engine according to the knowledge base. The material properties and design information for railway plate girder bridges are stored in the database. It is found that the developed expert system is efficient for design as well as for evaluation because it is organized in different design/evaluation modules and can be updated easily. Graphics programming has also been used to make the system an efficient user interactive. The application of the expert system is presented using an example.