By James R. Slagle, Henry Hamburger
Communications of the ACM,
September 1985,
Vol. 28 No. 9, Pages 994-1004
10.1145/4284.4291
Comments
We describe an expert system for resource allocation in a particular military domain. The system incorporates variants of several important techniques of artificial intelligence and makes the first use of the Merit system for question selection. This technique enables the system to direct the acquisition of information by finding questions with a high ratio of probable importance to difficulty. In the current application, each resource is a military weapon, each task to which such a resource can be allocated is firing at a military target, and the objective function is the expected reduction in value of targets. The coefficients that relate a particular resource to a particular task are not provided explicitly. Instead, in the first phase of the allocation process, the system uses a computation network to determine the effectiveness of each individual weapon against each prospective target. The network, built by a domain expert in advance, allows reasoning with logical, Bayesian, and expert-defined operators. After the calculation of individual effectiveness values, portions of an allocation tree are constructed to determine good allocation plans for the set of weapons. The individual effectiveness values are used to direct the traversal and pruning of the allocation tree.
The full text of this article is premium content
No entries found
Log in to Read the Full Article
Need Access?
Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.
Create a Web Account
If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.
Join the ACM
Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.
Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine
Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.
Purchase the Article
Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.
