DT-PLANNER - AN ENVIRONMENT FOR MANAGING DYNAMIC DECISION-PROBLEMS

The problem of formulating plans under uncertainty and coping with dyn amic decision problems is a major task of both artificial intelligence and control theory applications in medicine. In this paper we will de scribe a software package, called DT-Planner, designed to represent an d solve dynamic decision problems that can be modelled as Markov decis ion processes, by exploiting a novel graphical formalism, called influ ence view. An influence view is a directed acyclic graph that depicts the probabilistic relationships between the problem state variables in a generic time transition; additional variables, called event variabl es, may be added, in order to describe the conditional independencies between state variables. By using the specified conditional independen ce structure, an influence view may allow a parsimonious specification of a Markov decision process. DT-Planner lets the user specify and ma nage models through a user-friendly graphical interface, and implement s efficient for policy determination algorithms. DT-Planner is written in C with Open Interface(TM) libraries and can be obtained, for non c ommercial use, via anonymous ftp without charge. (C) 1997 Elsevier Sci ence Ireland Ltd.