A fuzzy case based reasoning approach to value engineering

This paper is intended to assist the experts during the creativity phase of value engineering through utilizing the past experiences and avoid them in a specific domain from repeating the same experience. To this purpose, a general fuzzy case based reasoning (CBR) system is developed. Our system benefits from a fuzzy clustering model for fuzzy data to facilitate case retrieval and reduce the time complexity. The inherent analogical nature of a case-based reasoning (CBR) model and its integration with fuzzy theory would facilitate access to more precise and systematically classified information during a VE workshop. In order to test the performance of the proposed system, it is applied to suburban highway design data extracted from National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 282.