Keywords: control, intelligence, CPTED, environment, improvement, safety.

The level of safety for users of a constructed facility depends on the design, maintenance, and management of the facility. Designs that use Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles provide a passive mode of enhancing the level of safety to a certain degree. Maintenance, on the other hand, not only prolongs the use of the facility but also gives the user a sense of being periodically monitored, which potentially strengthens the user's awareness of safety. Managerial effort is the degree of integration of the aforementioned factors.

The feeling of being safe is the opposite feeling or sense of surrounding dangers. Environmental design is one of the key factors that contributes to the sense of safety or conversely to the sense of danger of those using the constructed facility. Tseng et al [1] proposed a safety assessment program employing environmental design to evaluate the safety condition of a parking facility. In their paper, the authors designed a computer program and argued that it is possible to make assessment regarding the users' safety of a particular facility with experts' knowledge built in the form of IF-THEN rules. This provides us with an approach to evaluate and even control the level of safety for the user of a facility with a sufficient knowledge base. This paper introduces a computer program that may be used to predict or even control the level of safety for a particular facility.

There are many factors that may have an impact on the safety of a facility; for example, the location of the stairway and the degree of transparency of an elevator in a building. Crimes usually occur without warning. Constant monitoring of the environment is an effective way to fight crime but the cost is always a concern. Use of the CPTED principles to identify potential factors may help management to foresee the danger and the relationship between users and the environment and will be beneficial to both the users and the management.

The relationship between the safety factors and the desired level of safety needs to be established based on expert knowledge. Representation of the knowledge will be presented in the form of IF-THEN rules. Since the relations are mostly expressed in words, fuzzy set theory was employed to assemble the knowledge base.

Derived from the fuzzy set theory, fuzzy control has shown its strength in many industrial applications, such as medical diagnostic systems and robotic machinery. The authors describe a model that can be used to predict and maintain the level of safety based on the consideration of the associated environmental designs.

Markov's Chain theory has been widely used in stochastic modelling. The authors include the one-step transition matrix for predicting the future value of the level of safety of the targeted parking garage. A computer program has been developed to illustrate the concept of the employment of fuzzy control. A module that implements Markov's Chain theory has been included for comparison purposes.

1

C.C. Tseng, J.W. Duane, and F.C. Hadipriono, "Safety assessment of a constructed facility", Journal of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Jan 24th, 2004.

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