Explanation of construction engineering knowledge in expert systems

Critical attention is being given to the application of expert systems to civil and construction engineering problems. A central feature of expert systems is the ability to explain the reasoning that these systems are using. This paper provides a succinct survey of some of the explanation features commonly found in expert systems. The paper presents the logic and computer code for a C language explanation facility which was developed for use with the M.1 expert system shell. The C program is context-sensitive and allows explanations to be nested so the user can request progressively more detailed explanations. In addition to the explanation feature, the C program will allow access to ASCII files contain a variety of information. The C program has been used in some applications to access “help,” “conclusions,” “warning,” or “assumption” files. The paper provides a demonstration of the explanation program in a simple civil engineering context.