Development of an expert system and software agent for aviation safety assessment

Abstract : The primary goal of this thesis is to design, develop and test an internet based prototype model for using expert system and software agent technologies to automate some of the analytical tasks in conducting aviation safety assessments using the data collected by the automated Aviation Command Safety Assessment (ACSA) system. The Aviation Command Safety Assessment is a questionnaire survey methodology developed to evaluate a Naval Aviation Command's safety climate, culture, and safety program effectiveness. The survey was a manual process first administered in the fall of 1996. The survey was then automated in 1999 and is administered over the World Wide Web. The results of this thesis are a prototype model and a software agent application that evaluates data contained in the ACSA database for organizational safety assessment and for database integrity. All source code is provided and discussed in detail.