A Knowledge Based System for Deriving Qualitative Seismic Behavior

Ganguly, Jaideep; Kausel, Eduardo; Sriram, Duvvuru; ,

A Knowledge Based System for Deriving Qualitative Seismic Behavior

by Jaideep Ganguly, MIT, United States,
Eduardo Kausel, MIT, United States,
Duvvuru Sriram, MIT, United States,

Document Type: Proceeding Paper

Part of: Computer Utilization in Structural Engineering

Abstract:

The analysis and design of complex or critical facilities, such as tall buildings, nuclear power plants, offshore structures, or cable stayed bridges requires that these facilities be made safe against the effect of earthquake induced loads. With the advent of digital computers it was possible to perform large scale computations to simulate the effect of dynamic loads on structures. Currently a number of sophisticated computer programs exist that allow us to perform analysis and design of complex structures. However, none of these programs have any reasoning capability. Users of numerical packages must anticipate the behavior prior to analysis. The purpose of the analysis is usually to confirm the anticipated behavior. In this paper we describe the architecture of QSEIS, a system implemented in C and Prolog, that derives the qualitative behavior of structural systems under seismic loads from structural descriptions based on heuristic expert knowledge and qualitative reasoning capabilities.

Return to search