Decision support system for customs examination

The policies of globalization and liberalization followed in the last few decades in the world have resulted in exponential growth of volume and complexity of the international trade. The customs departments are required to collect customs duty and prevent smuggling without choking the flow of the goods and services. Customs are using various risk management techniques to achieve these objectives. Since the risk management is based on the statistical analysis of past data, it is not very useful if sufficient numerical data are not available. Risk management tools available today can´t incorporate the innovativeness and creativity of human mind in devising new methods to carry out smuggling. We have developed a decision support system, which incorporates the expertise of the experienced officers of the customs and specific information received from different sources like informers in linguistic terms, into the system by using fuzzy logic based expert system.