An expert system utility for environmental impact assessment in engineering

Abstract

The idea of this project was to create a prototype primary environmental impact assessment computer program for use in the planning of engineering projects by engineers. The idea is that this system will be used early in the planning phase of projects, to identify potential negative environmental impacts and thereby iteratively modify proposals before further work on them is undertaken. The result would be a saving in time and money to clients by minimizing abortive work. The problem is highly complex in that there are almost limitless combinations of environmental characteristics available for selection for the evaluation of a project proposal. Each characteristic, in turn, is able to assume a varying level of importance. The structure of the system developed to solve this problem uses a combination of an expert system shell and conventional computer programs. The trend in modern environmental impact assessment methods is towards qualitative methods of assessment. As a result, the expert system shell SYNAPSE was chosen to provide a decision-making facility for each environmental characteristic using heuristic techniques. Due to certain limitations of SYNAPSE, a number of computer programs were developed to enable other supporting capabilities to be available to users. These programs were written using Turbo Pascal features such as windowing and event-driven regimens. The concept of using expert systems in environmental management is not new, with several papers published to date. The writer proposes a method whereby a set of rulebases (each specializing in a specific environmental characteristic) can be assembled for the specific problem at hand, and each environmental characteristic assigned a weighting according to the importance of that characteristic to the problem. The results of the SYNAPSE consultation are in the form of real-value logic, and are finally combined and presented to the user in a graphical qualitative form. The programs were developed using certain design criteria, the most important of which was user friendliness. The program utility is rich with features, including an installation program, help facilities, screen “saving”, pulldown menus, picklists, file viewers, editors and graphics.