The proposed approach of knowledge base for the identification of promising countermeasures to reduce casualties amongst motorcyclists

This paper presents a method to enable a collaborative evaluation of the potential effectiveness of safety solutions for motorcycles by exploiting the knowledge and experience of the stakeholders in the field of motorcycle safety. The method presented here and proposed for future use relies on a “Knowledge Base” approach, in which expert opinions regarding the relevance of a set of items in a range of situations are collected, together with empirical exposure data. Turned into motorcycle safety, the items to be evaluated were safety functions, and the exposure data were real crash data. A Knowledge Base of Motorcycle Safety (KBMS) was used to collect expert opinions regarding the potential effectiveness of a given set of safety systems with respect to a set of given crash scenarios. The real data allow considering actual frequencies for the given scenarios. The outcome of the KBMS was a computed priority list of the most promising safety functions for the improvement of motorcyclists’ safety. (A)