A knowledge-based decision-support system for health and safety competence assessment

It is believed that standard, generic pre-qualification competence questionnaires can often be irrelevant, create a great deal of paperwork, and be of little benefit to health and safety. Under the Construction (Design and Management) (CDM) Regulations 2007, clients have to take reasonable steps to ensure that all duty-holders to be appointed or engaged are health and safety competent. Since many clients have little knowledge of construction and health and safety, it is difficult for them to make reasonable decision on the selection of health and safety competent duty-holders. In order to assist such clients fulfil their CDM duties, a knowledge-based decision-support model was developed on the basis of the knowledge representation and reasoning features of making health and safety competence assessment. The knowledge-based decision model utilised rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning and hypertext technology to support three decision-making mechanisms. In order to realise on-line automation, HTML, JSP and MySQL are adopted to develop a dynamic internet-based KBS on a commercial JSP web server. A conceptual architecture of the KBS demonstrated the structure of the system for the future development.