The maintenance of structures has now been accepted as the problem of rapidly growing importance, because structures are being operated for a much longer period of time than ever before and their operating conditions are becoming more and more severe. Although maintenance work might be formalized in their fundamental procedures, most of the work involved are difficult to put into proper form or perspective. Therefore, to perform good maintenance work, wide variety of knowledge and experience is called for and what is just as much important as deep knowledge and experience is the adequate decision making as to what kinds of knowledge or experience should be applied. As the problem of maintenance is thus too much complex, an interactive decision support system for the application to an oil storage tank has been developed. What differentiates our system from others is that our system is programmed mainly using Prolog to cope with the non-deterministic and ill-formed nature of the problem. The effectiveness of introducing logical programming technique has been verified through development of the system and TSS sessions.
Transactions of JWRI 13 (2), 333-335, 1984-12
Osaka University