Developing Knowledge Based Expert System for Road Traffic Accident Control: The Case of Jimma Town Traffic Office

Abstract

In Ethiopia road traffic accidents are becoming big issue that needs critical solution by government body with traffic police office to save life of the citizens. The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of developing road traffic accident control knowledge based expert system (RTACKBE) prototype for making decision. RTACKBE system is a system that diagnoses a road traffic accident by learning domain knowledge generated by expert and produce preventive measurement as a solution. The system present mitigating measures and decide potential alternatives solution for alleviation of traffic accidents by considering preventive measurement to save life of citizen. This RTACKBES is scoped with vehicle to vehicle crash and vehicle crash pedestrian. The source of data were from both primary (using such as observation and interview); and secondary data sources like traffic accident report documents for design of this study. To design system prototype researcher used KBS development methodology that involves knowledge acquisition, representation and modeling steps. Moreover, domain knowledge has been acquired from domain expert using data collecting method particularly by interviewing and from data mining techniques to process past traffic accident record. Acquired knowledge was represented by sets of rule determined by PART algorithm for extracted knowledge from data mining. Acquired and represented knowledge was modeled based on decision tree structure resulted by J48 prune algorithm. Finally Web development tools and Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data mining tools have been used for the design of the system. The performance of system was evaluated and tested using two evaluation performance; one: using test case and two: using user acceptance. As a result of finding the prototype knowledge based expert system is promising and applicable in the domain area (Jimma town) with the user acceptance of 84.17%. The performance of the system was achieved with 84.2% due to perform and process expected task operation. The importance and requirement of the system on domain area was evaluated by domain expert based on simplicity in terms of its efficiency and ease of using was 97.5%. The user accepted RTACKBE system as a result of user acceptance and test case evaluation and performance results are achieved the objectives of this study.