Abstract:
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.