UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

This paper describes a microcomputer-based tool that has been developed to facilitate acquisition and improvement of skills in urban transportation decision making. This tool interfaces with a complex gaming-simulation model and involves a knowledge-based expert system, built using programming techniques from the field of artificial intelligence. The gaming-simulation model synthesizes the consequences of the decision-making activities of a Transportation Director (model user) in a city with urgent transportation needs. The role of the expert system is to advise users on how to achieve multiple street and transit system goals over a ten-year period, during which time several hundred decisions must be made. Each year, the expert system suggests actions to the user that can be used as possible inputs to the following year's budgetary and decision-making process. Results of limited tests to date indicate that this expert system permits achievement of performance levels that very few unassisted users can attain.