This paper describes briefly the development stages of a prototype expert system designed for assisting traffic safety analysts in Saudi Arabia to improve traffic safety at high accident (hazardous) locations. The system is developed due to the need for expertise and engineering judgement in this field in this developing country. The object-oriented technique has been implemented to build the system. The expertise used in building the knowledge base of the system has been extracted from literature and a human expert from USA. A future work will be carried out to modify this knowledge to make it suitable for traffic conditions in Saudi Arabia. The system prompts the user for certain data and then provides one or more countermeasures of treatment. OBS is as stand-alone system and still in its preliminary stages, yet it can be extended and interfaced with related-accident systems. (A)
Abstract