Using a Fuzzy Expert System to Represent Risk: FORAS

The goal of the Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS) project is to address the needs of commercial aviation safety departments for an operational risk assessment tool. FORAS consists of an aviation risk modeling methodology and a set of software programs to create aviation risk models. It systematizes the process of eliciting human expertise, provides for a natural representation of the knowledge in a fuzzy expert system, and automates the process of risk assessment. A FORAS model is valuable to airline safety departments for examining risk trends, to dispatch departments for assessing risks associated with each flight, and to airline executives for quantifying the effects of making safety-related changes.