Routine decision making using generic tasks

摘要

Decision making can be viewed as a form of planning. When the decision making process is in a well-known domain, the process can further be classified as routine decision making or routine planning. Routine planning problems can be solved as a series of generic tasks. This paper takes a task-level approach to solving decision making problems by using the tasks of plant-step generation, plant-step assessment and plan-step assembly. The particular problem described here is consumer decision making, where a consumer must decide what grocery items to purchase to fulfill their nutritional needs. A consumer is modeled based on the consumers preferences, constraints and needs. This paper will detail this task-level approach by examining the subtasks of routine planning and the knowledge required by these subtasks and then provide a description and example of Shopper, a knowledge-based system for consumer decision making.