Abstract
One of the major objectives in the DRIVE project In-depTH Accident data Collection and Analysis (ITHACA) is the development of a prototype expert system that should support the analyses of in-depth road accident data. In order to assess the feasibility of an expert system a literature review of expert systems has been carried out. This review describes theoretical aspects, potential application areas and prerequisites for application of expert systems. The knowledge acquisition is generally considered to be the bottleneck in the development of expert systems. Not only the elecitation of knowledge but also the structuring of knowledge into a useful artifact seems difficult.