An Expert System to Analyze Hazardous Intersections

The detailed analysis of highway locations that have been identified as hazardous within the framework of a state Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) requires a great deal of time and money to perform. Given the limited resources available to state highway agencies, whose task it is to perform such analyses, it seems a worthwhile effort to automate this "location analysis." And, given the nature of location analysis problems, which are based on judgement rather than mathematical models, it was known a prior; that conventional automation techniques were not appropriate for this application. A prototype microcomputer-based expert system, which performs location analysis, was developed to assess the feasibility of applying this new technology to location analysis problems. This paper describes the prototype system, and presents a brief discussion of some of the issues that were addressed when building the system.