The intrinsic variability of geotechnical materials and range of foundation problems has led to the development of various kinds of test methods for determining different aspects of engineering soil behaviour. However, these are complicated by the variations of test equipment, procedure and operation. It is necessary to carry out a soil investigation programme to gather qualitative and quantitative information both of which are inevitably uncertain and imprecise. The development of knowledge-based systems opens the way for dealing with these difficulties in geotechnical engineering in a rational and efficient manner. With the introduction of object-oriented programming concepts to some highly commercial languages such as C++ and Pascal, these languages become ideal for knowledge-based system development mainly because of their associated processing speed, the high capability to support complex knowledge representation structures and compatibility with other existing programs. This approach for knowledge representation is adopted and used to develop software for planning soil exploration programmes. In each of the various components involved, uncertainties are addressed using lower level probability techniques. This paper discusses the development of a knowledge-based system for planning soil exploration programmes implemented in C++ on a 486 microcomputer.

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