Expert Systems in Structural Safety Assessment

Structural safety of industrial systems and components raises a steadily growing public, scientific and engineering interest, and causes permanent development of methods and techniques used for its assessment. In addition to the well established engineering methods, applied in the field, several new methods and tools have emerged recently. Among them,

The volume combines tutorials covering basic elements of expert (or knowledge based) systems and practical building of the expert systems to be applied in structural engineering, with the lecture dealing with the various particular application sub-domains like corrosion, stress analysis, high temperature and other pressurized components, use of hypertext, etc.

Fuzzy sets were introduced by Zadeh (1965) as a means of representing and manipulating data that was not precise, but rather fuzzy. Fuzzy logic pro vides an inference morphology that enables approximate human reasoning capabilities to be applied to knowledge-based systems. The theory of fuzzy logic provides a mathematical strength

During the past two decades, the consideration of mUltiple objectives in modeling and decision making has grown by leaps and bounds. The nineties in particular have seen the emphasis shift from the dominance of single-objective modeling and optimization toward an emphasis on multiple objectives. The proceedings of this Conference epitomize

This proceedings volume contains 38 papers presented at the 4th Working Conference on "Rel iability· and Optimization of Structural Systems", held at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, September 11- 13, 1991. The Working Conference was organised by the IFIP (Interna tional Federation for Information Processing) Working Group 7.5 of