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Two disastrous Tsunamis, one on the west coast of Sumatra Island, Indonesia, in 2004 and another in North East Japan in 2011, had seriously destroyed a large number of bridges. Thus, experimental tests in a wave flume and a fluid structure interaction (FSI) analysis were constructed to gain insight into tsunami bore force on coastal bridges.

Various wave heights and shallow water were used in the experiments and computational process. A 1:40 scaled concrete bridge model was placed in mild beach profile similar to a 24 × 1.5 × 2 m wave flume for the experimental investigation. An Arbitrary Lagrange Euler formulation for the propagation of tsunami solitary and bore waves by an FSI package of LS-DYNA on high-performance computing system was used to evaluate the experimental results.

The excellent agreement between experiments and computational simulation is shown in results. The results showed that the fully coupled FSI models could capture the tsunami wave force accurately for all ranges of wave heights and shallow depths. The effects of the overturning moment, horizontal, uplift and impact forces on a pier and deck of the bridge were evaluated in this research.

Photos and videos captured during the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the 2011 Japan tsunami showed solitary tsunami waves breaking offshore, along with an extremely turbulent tsunami-induced bore propagating toward shore with significantly higher velocity. Consequently, the outcomes of this current experimental and numerical study are highly relevant to the evaluation of tsunami bore forces on the coastal, over sea or river bridges. These experiments assessed tsunami wave forces on deck pier showing the complete response of the coastal bridge over water.

Expert systems are computer-based systems that mimic the logical processes of human experts or organizations to give advice in a specific domain of knowledge. Fuzzy expert systems use fuzzy logic to handle uncertainties generated by imprecise, incomplete and/or vague information. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems.

The authors have carefully reviewed 281 journal publications and 149 conference proceedings published over the past 37 years since 1982. The authors grouped the journal publications and conference proceedings separately accordingly to the methods, application domains, tools and inference systems.

The authors have synthesized the findings and proposed useful suggestions for future research directions. The authors show that the most common use of fuzzy expert systems is in the medical field.

Fuzzy logic can be used to manage uncertainty in expert systems and solve problems that cannot be solved effectively with conventional methods. In this study, the authors present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems which could be useful for practicing managers developing expert systems under uncertainty.