Keywords: artificial intelligence, safety management, epiphenomenal intelligence, monitoring, ethnography, anthropology.

This paper represents a rethinking of the contribution of artificial intelligence techniques to engineering and environmental safety management, based on a 13-year work experience [1]. The author of this paper served as a software engineer at ISMES, a private research and development institute involved with safety management in several engineering fields, from dam safety to environmental protection, from seismic monitoring to the protection of cultural heritage.

In its fifty year life ISMES developed outstanding research in safety management and developed techniques and systems to deal with different problems in the field of safety management; these systems have been installed in hundreds of sites in Italy and abroad [2,3,4].

The experience acquired by managing emergency situations, such as those of the ruinous Valtellina landslide or the collapse of the Civic Tower in Pavia, demonstrated that the emergencies must be tackled through the creation of an organisation that manages the knowledge of the actual conditions and their evolution as provided not only by basic studies, but also by instrumentation networks that monitor the most critical phenomena.

In this field artificial intelligence concepts and technologies can assist engineers and safety managers by providing additional software components to be integrated into existing information and monitoring systems, which may perform intelligent processing of safety related data.

When we started our project aimed at applying artificial intelligence to safety problems in structural and environmental engineering, we were in the late eighties and we firmly trusted in the possibility of developing a traditional expert system able to master the domain and to drive its users from monitoring data, visual inspections or test data to safety evaluations.

A few years later we had changed our viewpoint: we were dealing with ill-structured domains, where the objects to be checked - dams, monuments, landslides - are one-off objects that cannot be tested or statistically defined. They behave as a continuum, interact with the social environment, are subject to uncontrolled or unpredictable input, cannot be controlled, are difficult and expensive to be measured. Their knowledge is often based on partial models.

All these characteristics led us in the early nineties to restrict our target to a family of decision support systems for the real-time evaluation of monitoring data which were essentially model-based interpretation systems made of several partial models of the system to be checked.

Each of these models is often poor and would not provide an answer good enough for safety management problems. Nevertheless, the appropriate behaviour is given by the simultaneous action of many different agents and their co-ordination via the connective structure of the system.

Therefore, a form of epiphenomenal intelligence [5,6,7] emerges from the behaviour of a system made of small partial models: users perceive the system as a reliable assistant, able to filter false alarms, catch significant events, explain what is going on and what are the causes and the possible effects.

1

Salvaneschi, P., Lazzari, M., "Integrating databases, data communication and artificial intelligence for applications in systems monitoring and safety problems", in "Database and data communication network systems", Leondes, C. T., (Editor), Academic Press, San Diego, CA, USA, 2002.

2

Bonaldi, P., Carradori, G., Fanelli, M., Giuseppetti, G., Ruggeri, G., "Modern Techniques for Dam Safety Surveillance and Evaluation", in "Proceedings of the 16th ICOLD Congress", San Francisco, CA, USA, 1988.

3

Anesa, F., Bonzi, A., Laquintana, D., Pilenga, A., Vavassori, M., "Valtellina alert system: towards an environmental risk diagnosis expert system", in "Proceedings of the IABSE Colloquium on Expert Systems in Civil Engineering", Bergamo, Italy, 347-354, 1989.

4

Azzoni, A., Chiesa, S., Frassoni, A., Govi, M., "The Valpola landslide", "Engineering Geology", 33, 59-70, 1992. doi:10.1016/0013-7952(92)90035-W

5

Hofstadter, D., "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid", Basic Books, New York, NY, USA, 1979.

6

Hofstadter, D., "Fluid concepts and creative analogies", Basic Books, New York, NY, USA, 1995.

7

Dennett, D.C., "Brainstorms: philosophical essays on mind and psychology", Bradford Books, Montgomery, VT, USA, 1978.

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