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The Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS) is a methodology for producing aviation risk models for air carriers. These risk models represent the causal risk factors and their relationships as a fuzzy expert system. Such a risk model, for Approach and Landing incident risk, has been created for EVA Airways. This paper will present some initial findings from the development and trial application period of the risk model.

The Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS) is a risk modeling methodology which represents risk factors and their interrelationships as a fuzzy expert system. The FORAS process systematizes the process of eliciting human expertise, provides for a natural representation of the knowledge in an expert system, and automates the process of risk assessment. There are many challenges in developing such a system. These include the selection of relevant subject matter experts, the combination and reconciliation of multiple, subjective knowledge bases, and the representation of knowledge in a model easily expressed, evaluated, and revised. This paper will present the technical background of the FORAS methodology, and demonstrate its implementation, as performed on its first operational partner, EVA Airways, of Taiwan.

The goal of the Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS) project is to address the needs of commercial aviation safety departments for an operational risk assessment tool. FORAS consists of an aviation risk modeling methodology and a set of software programs to create aviation risk models. It systematizes the process of eliciting human expertise, provides for a natural representation of the knowledge in a fuzzy expert system, and automates the process of risk assessment. A FORAS model is valuable to airline safety departments for examining risk trends, to dispatch departments for assessing risks associated with each flight, and to airline executives for quantifying the effects of making safety-related changes.

The Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS) is envisioned as a risk management tool that will enable operators at the safety, flight operations, and dispatch level to monitor and reduce the risks associated with individual flights, as well as the entire flight operation. FORAS will focus on flight operation processes and the initial work will provide a quantitative assessment of risk of controlled flight into terrain and risk of turbulence-related injury. The risk model is based on a large set of possible risk factors roughly classified under the categories of environment (including weather), operator, service provider, flight path, aircraft, cabin, and air handling. We present here a description of progress to date on FORAS, as well as plans for its future development.