Development of a systematic approach for knowledge acquisition and experience capture of veteran practitioners in the highway construction industry

Every company in every industry faces the prospect of the loss of knowledge and experience through the departure of key personnel. This predicament created by the loss of veteran employees is especially acute in the highway construction industry, where frequently the experience is either undocumented or poorly documented, and the knowledge possessed by these people is retained exclusively as personal property. This dissertation not only explores the difficulties associated with pursuing an approach to acquire heretofore undocumented construction knowledge and expertise, but it also recognizes the vast amounts of highway construction data and information that are currently available within the transportation industry. Any concerted effort attempting to capture the construction knowledge and expertise of a large organization, such as a department of transportation, would be severely remiss in not taking advantage of this existing base of documented information.

This research endeavor represents a comprehensive study of the problems associated with the development of a systematic approach for capturing the knowledge and experience of a large organization, and establishing a computer delivery system for dissemination of this encoded information. Fundamental to this delivery system is the creation of a user-friendly computing environment that will provide an intuitive tool capable of assisting both veteran and novice practitioners in fashioning more informed decisions concerning problems that may arise during normal and abnormal highway construction operations.

One of the major accomplishments of this research effort, was the development of an information management prototype system which was given the name IN REACH (Intelligent Information Retrieval and Expert Advice for the Construction of Highways). IN REACH is comprised of an underlying, fully functionally hypertext network which is augmented by the integration of some innovative database management and expert systems strategies. In an effort to add structure to the inherently unstructured world of a pure hypertext system, IN REACH utilizes these integrated strategies to enhance the user's capability of direct queries to the overall network, both statically and dynamically.