Date of Graduation

1999

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

B. Gopalakrishnan

Committee Member

Dianne McMullin

Committee Member

Warren Myers

Abstract

Today, there is an increasing emphasis on the safety and health of a worker. Optimum resources are invested to ensure worker's safety. Most of the regulations, and other measures as suggested by NIOSH, OSHA and other leading safety organizations concentrate towards the steps that a worker needs to take to use a product safely. Instead, if the product itself is designed to be safe, and if the manufacturer of the product knows about the product's safety before usage, it would reduce a great deal of wastage of resources. This research is an attempt to implement the above ideology. The objective of this research is to design and develop an artificial intelligence application viz., an expert system operable through the Internet. The TEXPERT expert system functions through the World Wide Web, thus enabling designers all over the world to evaluate their designs for worker's safety. Presently, for the purpose of this research, a prototype, which is a Ditch Digger®, was selected and the expert knowledge was gathered and coded into the system. This thesis details on the various aspects involved in the component categorization, knowledge acquisition and coding of the expert shell, design of the TEXPERT system, and finally on the consultation procedure and validation of the system.

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