ROUTINE DECISION-MAKING USING GENERIC TASKS

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 pla nning problems can be solved as a series of generic tasks. This paper takes a task-level approach to solving decision making problems by usi ng the tasks of plan-step generation, plan-step assessment and plan-st ep assembly. The particular problem described here is consumer decisio n 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 descr iption and example of Shopper a knowledge-based system for consumer de cision making. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd