A framework for supporting the design of highway bridges

The paper describes a framework for supporting a cognitive approach to design founded, on the following structuring concepts: active support and interaction, exploration, analogy, expected utility, situated and inductive learning. Although the model is assumed to be independent from the domain knowledge, being applied to any process of Formulation-Synthesis-Analysis-Evaluation-Decision, the design of highway bridges was chosen as an appropriate domain for experimenting and validating the model. A pragmatic combination of a number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques enables the implementation of the above mentioned concepts.