Designing an Expert System to Support Aviation Occurrence Investigations

This paper introduces an Expert System acting as an intelligent agent to interrogate past aircraft occurrence data to support the aircraft occurrence investigators. This Expert System can potentially identify similar occurrences that provide indicators of contributing factors that may otherwise have been missed. This intelligence comes from the Expert System's ability to learn from past occurrence data using the combined Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) inference technique and AcciMaps to emulate the aircraft occurrence investigators' evidence analytical reason model. The learned expert knowledge is presented graphically and interactively to the user (investigator) using the AcciMaps. The paper includes an overview of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) investigation evidence analysis workflow, popular mainstream inference techniques used in Expert Systems, evaluation of the proposed Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) inference technique and AcciMap, including an example study. The FLS inference technique has met the Expert System requirements to support aviation occurrence investigations.