Prototyp - GC&FD

DAP - Genova, GCC - Athens. An artificial intelligence approach to the evaluation of geotechnical design parameters and automated selection and design of foundations for industrial buildings has been developed as an independent submodule of the COMBI project.

In the field of geotechnical engineering, judgement and experience of designers play a decisive role, much more significant than known analytical techniques. This is therefore an interesting field of application for KB-Tools.

The prototype system simulates the way real experts deal with the design of a building, reasoning with the minimum available information. The result of such an evaluation is the selection of the optimal design alternative for the building and site under analysis.

The system is comprised essentially of a knowledge base, containing the domain rules (about 400), an inference engine able to process and to interpret the available data, and various data bases, containing information about the site and the buildings to be analysed. Besides these main components, several conventional software packages are incorporated into the system, such as a management utility for database interaction, extended graphics programs, conventional engineering programs for the solution of specific domain problems (bearing capacity for shallow foundations, settlements, pile capacity, lateral forces on the piles, group effect etc.) .

The developed expert system combines two aspects: (1) the geotechnical site characterisation of the soil conditions and (2) foundation design. It can reason with a minimum of available information, as frequently occurs in the conceptual design phase. When insufficient data are available for design, an inference mechanism makes conservative choices for the missing information.

Geotechnical data are stored in the site database with their geographical location. This allows the user to extract a particular area of the site for analysis. Using this option, the user can verify possible problem areas on the site, which can be avoided by shifting the position of the building.

In order to verify the system performance, a testing program has been developed through subsequent steps, starting from a comparison of the analysis results to measured foundation performances, and then comparing the design approach of the system to previous and parallel off-line conventional calculations. It was then possible to try early applications in real design activities, as a support of the usual methods, and in contests requiring usually short times and formalised procedures.

A real-life case study for the design of the foundation of the "Olympic Flight Simulator Building" in Thessaloniki, Greece has been carried out for validation. The obtained results for the foundation system compare very well to the actual design.