An expert system for the design of highway noise barriers in the microcomputer environment

The most effective method for highway noise mitigation is the noise barrier. The development of a prototype expert system, in a microcomputer environment, to design noise barriers is presented. CHINA is an expert system which is a tool on the Vanderbilt University VAX 11/780. It contains rules which encode the facts and heuristic knowledge by noise barrier design experts. The implementation of the CHINA expert system on the IBM PC is presented. The inference/development shell chosen for this project was the EXSYS expert system development package. EXSYS is a shell written in C which encodes knowledge in the form of IF-THEN production rules. This expert system designs noise barriers in a way that approaches that of a human expert. The authors recommend several improvements to the project as a motivation for the continuing development of this system