Knowledge-Based Expert System in Traffic Signal Control Systems.

Knowledge based expert systems (KBESs) have been developed in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The aim of knowledge-based expert system is emulation and imitating social problems and then providing human-solving behaviour in complex real world tasks. The potentiality of such systems and their possibilities of application to transport problems have generated considerablely within the transport engineering field. Because of increasing transport demand which produces traffic congestion, safety problems and environmental degradation, the applications of knowledge-based expert system are likely to be the transport sector which are urban infrastructure design, transport planning, safety and maintenance, structures and equipment, vehicle scheduling, traffic monitoring and control especially in urban area and air traffic control. In spite of effectiveness and usefulness of such systems, they still include some problems such as those of knowledge representation and elicitation. In this paper, the concept of knowledge-based expert system is presented and some differences between knowledge-based expert systems and conventional computer programs are discussed. Also, basic structure of knowledge-based expert system and building knowledge-based expert system are described. Finally some developments and applications of expert system in traffic signal control field are identified and discussed