Traffic accidents modeling and analysis using temporal reasoning

Traffic accidents account for more than half a million casualties every year. The analysis of accidents helps identifying the elements that affect traffic conditions, the relationships between them, and how they may contribute to the occurrence of dangerous situations. In this paper, we present a temporal reasoning system for modeling and analyzing various types of accident scenarios. The system is based on event calculus and was implemented using Prolog. We exemplify the use of the system by applying it for modeling and analyzing a rear-end accident scenario.