An Advice Unit for Forward Housing Planning (LHS) Local Housing Strategy

To date, the use of an expert system in the field of urban

planning has been limited to the development of ideas and

concepts in the context of a few prototype systems. The slowness

in the emergence of practical system may be the disparities

between the type of problems planners typically deal with

(multidisciplinary; social, economic, political) and the type of

problems for which the problem-solving approach of expert

system is suited.

This paper contributes towards exploring the design of an

advice-type unit which augments housing planners' expertise in:

(i) digesting ill-structured housing problems; and (ii) selecting

the best plan or appropriate alternatives.

The discussion in this paper focuses on three main points: a well

defined problem domain in the context of preparing Local

Housing Strategy (LHS), the selected knowledge domain with

the decision graph structure adopted for this advice unit, and

the architectural design of this unit.