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 most novel ones are probably those related to expert system applica tions, appearing as an important possible improvement of the current engineering practice. The issue has been addressed by the international course EXPERT SYSTEMS IN STRUCTURAL SAFETY ASSESSMENT organized by MPA Stuttgart and JRC Ispra (Stuttgart, October 2-4, 1989), and the proceedings of the course are contained in this volume of the Lecture Notes ill Engineering. The contributions (invited lectures) tackle the issues usually confronting developers and users of expert systems applied in structural engineering, i.e. in structural safety and integrity assessment. Both the book and the course are a combination of a tutorial and of presentation of the current achievements in the field. Starting from the basic elements of expert systems (knowledge based systems), the book should "guide" the reader up to the applications in various particular sub-domains.

Inhalt
Introductory Part.- Structural Safety and Integrity Assessment and Use of Expert Systems at MPA Stuttgart.- Structural Safety Assessment as a Collective Cognitive Process.- Fundamentals of Expert Systems.- Knowledge Representation and Inference in Knowledge Based Systems (Expert Systems).- A Rule Backward Chainer for Knowledge Based Systems (Expert Systems).- An Industrial 1st Generation KBS (Expert System): DELTA-CATS.- Specific Issues Relevant for Applications of Expert Systems in Structural Engineering.- Treatment of Uncertainty, Evidence and Belief.- Uncertainty in KBS (expert systems).- Evidence and Belief in Expert Systems (Dempster-Shafer: A simplified view).- RUM (Reasoning with Uncertainty Module) and RUMRUNNER (RUM's Run Time System).- Uncertainty Representation in Knowledge Based Systems.- Decision Making.- Evaluation and Selection of Alternatives Considering Multiple Criteria.- Practical Building of Expert Systems for Structural Safety and Integrity Assessment.- Application of Expert Systems to Structural Engineering.- Practical Building of Expert Systems for Material Selection and Corrosion Problems.- Applications.- Pressurized Components.- Developing Expert Systems for Structural Diagnostic and Reliability Assessment at JRC.- Development of an Expert System for Leak-Before-Break Analysis.- ARTIC: A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Damage Assessment of High Temperature Pressurized Components.- ESR Project: Expert Systems Aided Asessement and Management of Remaining Life of Pressurized High Temperature Components.- Stress Analysis.- Learning Expert Systems in Numerical Analysis of Structures.- Non-Destructive Examination.- Expert Systems within the German HDR-Programme for the Assessment of the Integrity of Nuclear Components -Correlation of NDT-Resultswith Acoustic Emission Measurements and Fracture Mechanics Evaluations.- Corrosion.- On the Use of Expert Systems to Handle Corrosion Knowledge.- AI Based Corrosion Risk Analysis in Oil Refinery Operation.- Use of Hypertext for Corrosion Analysis.- Knowledge Engineering Issues.- Reasoning about Data: Combination of Multiple and non-Homogeneous Sources of Engineering Knowledge.- Experience in Inference Machine Building and a Case Study.- Use of Inquiry in Acquisition of Engineering Knowledge for Expert Systems Applied in the Structural Safety Assessment.- Connectionism versus GOFAI: A Brief Critical Analysis.