The paper presents an integrated knowledge-based system called SETHU (developed during the Indo-US collaborative research work between CMU of USA and IIT Madres of India, and the Doctoral work of the first author during 1990-1995), for preliminary bridge design on the basis of the actual design practice adopted by the design experts. Past researchers in the domain of bridges modelled the complex process using production rule-based techniques alone, due to which, these systems suffer from many limitations. Hence, the work reported in this paper attempts at studying the preliminary bridge design process with a view to identify various tasks that require the application of knowledge-based techniques and find suitable artificial intelligence techniques that are required to address the issues involved in a comprehensive manner. The paper starts with a brief review of the prior research efforts. An overview of the bridge design practice is presented next. Then the process model, which is designed based on the task analysis of the various preliminary bridge design tasks, is presented. The architecture of SETHU is presented nest. The conclusions arrived at based on the experience of the authors is presented in the final section of this paper.

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