Integral Solutions Ltd, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Lloyd’s Register, and Queen Mary and Westfield Colleges have been collaborating for the past year on a ?1.3m project to develop a new expert system for use in safety-critical situations. The three-year project is called RED, which stands for Rigorously Engineered Decisions, and is funded by the Department of Trade & Industry’s Science & Engineering Research Council Safety Critical Systems Initiative. The objective is to build and test prototype knowledge-based decision support tools, based on the decision-making and argumentation theories developed by the Imperial Research Cancer Fund. These tools will be used to create practical applications for commerce, industry and public services. Unix workstations are being used for the initial development, but the aim is to make the applications available for use on personal computers. RED Decision Support Systems contain decision-making modules, based on intelligent systems and artificial intelligence techniques, that reason out goals, and assemble and weigh arguments for or against particular decisions. The Fund will build a Rigorously Engineered Decisions application for cancer patient management. Lloyd’s Register will develop an application for system safety assessment for such markets as ships and nuclear power stations. Masons Solicitors, which specialises in computer law, is studying the legal implications of using Decision Support Systems in safety-critical situations, and are guiding the developers and users of RED DSS in legal liability matters such as who should be sued if things go wrong, or, put more positively, what can a systems builder do to avoid accusations of negligence. Queen Mary and Westfield Colleges are researching how concepts of safety, particularly application-independent concepts, such as fail-safe, can be represented in computer-based decision support systems. The objective is to integrate a safety argumentation manager into the applications. In the long term, Integral Solutions, which specialises in expert systems and consultancy, hopes to license out the software tools for further application development.
