A DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR BUREAUCRATIC POLICY ADMINISTRATION - ANABDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

A bureaucracy can be viewed as a set of policies that governs the acti vities of its people. The purpose of these policies is to improve oper ational effectiveness and efficiency. However, manual administration o f these policies is a tedious and often overwhelming task because it i s too cognitively demanding to keep track of the complex relationships between the policies. As a result, these policies often consist of ma ny inconsistencies (conflicts) as they evolve because there is no auto mated means to aid the administrators in detecting inconsistencies. In this paper, we present an approach that uses abductive logic programm ing for building a decision support system for the administration of b ureaucratic policies. The system will help administrators decide the c onsistency of a policy with respect to the current set of policies and hence, prevent the introduction of inconsistent policies.