The Case-Based Reasoning System for Knowledge Management of Engineering Consulting Projects

Retaining the knowledge acquired from each project is one of the major competitive advantages for engineering consultant industry. The traditional repository of a knowledge management system provides the memory for all the projects done by the company. But, due to the business nature of the industry, the knowledge is dispersed from design and planning for a highway construction project to auditing of sewage constructing project. The retrieval of knowledge becomes a less meaningful search through thousands of documents. The objective of this study is to design a case-based reasoning system with more accurate retrieval technology via object-oriented methodology. The object-oriented frame was designed to organize the knowledge acquired throughout the lifecycle of the engineering projects. The engineering knowledge store in the system can be retrieved in a more precise way through the specification of the object class. The prototype system is constructed by using the Java technology. Tomcat server and mySQL are used as the application and database servers.