Cross-viewpoint Consistency in Accident Investigations

abstract Accident reports are typically divided into chapters which reflect the different perspectives of various specialists. It is sometimes the case that these alternative viewpoints lead to inconsistencies and omissions where an incident covered at length by one specialist may be ignored by another. This creates a problem in that the conclusions of the report may thus be muddled or incomplete and consequently lead to further errors of comprehension amongst those who need to understand the findings. Similarly, several different reports of the same accident may be produced and it is desirable to have a rigorous method for checking consistency between them. This creates problems for the companies and regulators which must act on the findings of these inconsistent accounts. We present the novel application of the idea of cross-viewpoint consistency, typically used in software engineering, to unify different accident perspectives. Furthermore, we propose that the method of consistency checking that we use ensures that a new, more detailed view of the overall accident is produced which encompasses two or more different viewpoints. In doing so, we show, for the first time, how cross-viewpoint consistency checking may be achieved for accident analysis in the temporal logic of actions (TLA). abstract Keywords : Accident analysis, Temporal Logic of Actions, Cross-Viewpoint consistency, Unifying specification (account), internal consistency checking.