R&D Analyst: An Interactive Approach to Normative Decision System Model Construction
This is an incremental improvement for corporate decision-makers, offering a flexible approach to normative decision system model construction.
The paper tackles the problem of constructing influence diagram models for corporate R&D project evaluation by introducing R&D Analyst, an interactive intelligent decision system that guides users through model construction, with results suggesting its architecture is valuable for other domains.
This paper describes the architecture of R&D Analyst, a commercial intelligent decision system for evaluating corporate research and development projects and portfolios. In analyzing projects, R&D Analyst interactively guides a user in constructing an influence diagram model for an individual research project. The system's interactive approach can be clearly explained from a blackboard system perspective. The opportunistic reasoning emphasis of blackboard systems satisfies the flexibility requirements of model construction, thereby suggesting that a similar architecture would be valuable for developing normative decision systems in other domains. Current research is aimed at extending the system architecture to explicitly consider of sequential decisions involving limited temporal, financial, and physical resources.