THE POSSIBILITIES OF FUZZY SETS AND EXPERT SYSTEMS IN TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT

In recent years, the discipline of "artificial intelligence" has been successful in building systems that simulate and automate human expertise. An expert system, or more precisely, a knowledge-based expert system combines facts and rules about a specialized field with methods of applying these rules to reason about specific problems and draw conclusions. Additionally, the mathematics of fuzzy sets has also been shown to be a capable tool to methodically incorporate subjective judgement in decision-making processes. The purpose of the paper is to explore, and speculate how these techniques might be useful to the transportation engineer/manager. The specific focus is on hazard mitigation in the highway network.