| Today, there is an increasing emphasis on the safety and health of a worker. Optimum resources are invested to ensure workers 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 workers safety. Presently, for the purpose of this research, a prototype, which is a Ditch DiggerRTM 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. |
