Use of Expert Systems in Crisis Management

The today’s change in climatic conditions results in weather phenomena occurring increasingly more frequent in Poland that can lead to crisis situations. Also the growing number of high or increased risk of serious industrial failure establishments causes greater probability of adverse and harmful effects for the environment and the population. A response to the need for minimization of those and other threats is effective crisis management. This management should be supported by IT solutions. The paper proposes to use a selected artificial intelligent method - expert systems - in the crisis management process. An expert system is a computer program adopting the knowledge and reasoning mechanisms to solve problems that require experience and expertise. The idea of expert systems is to transfer the knowledge held by a domain expert into a knowledge base, which is applied by the reasoning mechanism. The article presents some results from surveys carried out in selected local government entities of the Silesian voivodeship as regards the interest in implementation of artificial intelligence in the discussed field, and proposes an expert system for a particular crisis situation.