Welitom Ttatom Pereira Da Silva,Marco Antonio Almeida de Souza, Universidade de Brasília, Engenharia Civil, wttatom@terra.com.br
Abstract
Identifying the factors that affect urban water consumption is very important to the management of available regional water resources. The conventional approach used to identify these factors needs large amount of data, besides being difficult to obtain. The objective of this paper is to identify the factors that affect the water consumption using an alternative methodology, the expert system approach. This methodology comprises: (1) literature review and analysis; (2) proposal of typical rules expressed in an „if (condition) – then (action)‟ format, based on the literature, interviews with experts, and observation; (3) development of prototype expert system (codification of the knowledge explicit in these rules); and, (4) evaluation of the developed prototype expert system. It was possible to conclude that the expert system approach has showed adequate for the identification of influent factors in the urban water consumption.
Keywords: influents factors; knowledge system; artificial intelligence