Application of approximate reasoning in marine and offshore safety engineering

Discusses potential applications of approximate reasoning (fuzzy set theory) to model natural language estimate of risk in the area of marine and offshore safety engineering. A methodology based on the approximate reasoning approach incorporating fuzzy set modelling has been proposed for situations which are by nature imprecise and where quantitative data is either not available or inappropriate. A hypothetical example is used to illustrate that fuzzy set modelling is a potential tool for safety engineering applications.