The proposed research will explore the applications of knowledge-based expert systems (KBES) to construction management by the development of prototype knowledge-based expert system aids for construction project planning in a limited project domain. A strategic advisor KBES for technologies and general sequences of activities as well as detailed KBES to produce a definition of tasks, resources, and predecessor relationships will be investigated. These KBES aids will interact with a user and general purpose databases describing the current project of interest and past metric coding schemes to represent spatial information. Construction project planning aids of this type will be useful to engineers and architects for design and estimation as well as constructors. With the use of general databases, they could form one element in integrated sets of computer aids for engineering and construction.
