The place of expert systems in civil engineering

Engineering is concerned with much more than calculation and numeric analysis. It is concerned with ideas, concepts, judgement and deploying experience which cannot be represented numerically. All of these appear to be outside the realm of traditional engineering computing. Engineers make use of knowledge about objects, events and processes and make declarative statements about them which are often written down symbolically. These limitations of traditional computing in civil engineering can be overcome by expert systems. In this paper we present a number of expert systems dealing with analysis, design and knowledge acquisition in the field of civil engineering.