Analysing Aviation Accidents Using WB-Analysis: An Application of Multimodal Reasoning

Multimodal Reasoning

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We describe our ongoing work in accident analysis. Accident reports should tell us at least what the accident was and what the critical events were. A third requirementhey should fulfil is to explain these events (see below) and their sequence (-~temporal reasoning). Explanation concerns causes (-~cansal reasoning), human intentions, purposes, capabilities and behavior (so-called human factors). Causality also involves the unfolding of events in time (Ladkin, Explaining Failure in Tense Logic, RVS-P~-96-13). We include social factors - obligations and the regulatory environment - amongst the human factors (--+deontic reasoning). Our goal is a rigorous method of incident explanation which contains search procedures for relevant facts and insists on rigorously formal proofs of aa explanation’s correctness and relative sufficiency.