A knowledge management-based engineering design system for highway design projects

ABSTRACT Construction engineering design is highly dependent on previous experience so experienced engineers normally produce the design. This practice allows the leakage of knowledge when experienced engineers leave and is costly in terms of the time required for design work. This study proposes a knowledge management–based engineering design system (KMEDS) that supports engineering design of highways and roads. A text mining technique using a vector space model (VSM) is used to retrieve documents. Nine historical design cases containing 1,683 engineering documents are collected as the knowledge base. A real-world express highway design project is used to test the feasibility of the proposed method. A questionnaire survey is then conducted to evaluate the proposed KMEDS. The approval rate is 88% in terms of system correctness and 86% in terms of time savings.