This paper describes the work undertaken to develop a highway safety expert system. The objective of the system is to provide highway safety officials with an efficient and reliable tool to identify accident prone locations and then quickly and reliable advise on the appropriate countermeasure(s) based on an analysis of the accident and roadway environment data. The main advantage of the system is its ability to process a large amount of accident data, separating location which are most promising to be treated by engineering measures and providing advise on the countermeasures and their expected effectiveness. The system also provides an enhancement to many of the techniques currently used in highway safety improvement programs including two new methods to identify accident prone locations. The nature of traffic safety problems which are ill-structured, poorly-understood, and lack explicit algorithms makes it well suited to the expert system approach. The system consists of three basic phases `detection', or "where are the safety problems ?"; `diagnosis', or "what causes the safety problem and what are the applicable countermeasure(s) ?"; and `remedy', or "what countermeasure(s) is effective to alleviate the safety problem ?". The three phases comprise the main components of highway safety improvement programs. This paper describes the development of both the detection and the diagnosis phases.
Samenvatting