Deciding Automatically: The Example of Rule Based Control

Abstract

The increasing development of automatic systems in most sectors of human activities (e.g. manufacturing, management, medicine, etc.) has progressively led to involving computers in many tasks traditionally reserved to humans, even the more “strategic” ones such as control, evaluation and decision-making. The main function of automatic decision systems is to act as a substitute for humans (decision makers, experts) in the execution of repetitive decision tasks. Such systems can be in charge of all or part of the decision process. The main tasks to be performed by automatic decision systems are collecting information (e.g. by sensors), making a diagnosis of the current situation, selecting relevant actions, executing and controlling these actions. Automatisation of these tasks requires the elaboration of computational models able to simulate human reasoning. Such models are, in many respects, comparable to those involved in the scientific preparation of human decisions. Indeed, deciding automatically is also a matter of representation, evaluation and comparison. For this reason, we introduce and discuss some very simple techniques used to design rule-based decision/control systems.