EAGER: Decision Support System for Reasoning with Preferences

EAGER：带有偏好的推理决策支持系统

• 批准号: 1143734
• 负责人: Samik Basu
• 金额: $ 11.14万
• 依托单位: Iowa State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-01 至 2013-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1143734&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Decision; Support; System; Reasoning

Automated decision support systems help users make informed and intelligent choices over a set of alternatives, taking into account user preferences and trade-offs among multiple system attributes. In the software engineering domain decision support systems are used to help in evaluating alternative design, technical and managerial choices in terms of quantitative preferences and trade-offs. Preferences over alternatives are evaluated either by directly soliciting from the stakeholders a measure of the perceived utility/value of each attribute, or by quantifying such utility/value based on past experience and expertise. In most practical settings, however, preferences over attributes cannot all be quantified. On the other hand, considering preferences only qualitatively (specifying them as simple relative orderings between alternatives) is also not practical. To overcome these limitations, the proposed research focuses on developing a new paradigm for decision support systems, where preferences are specified both in qualitative and quantitative terms.The main thrust of this work will be to: (a) develop robust formalisms for representing and reasoning with quantitative and qualitative preferences in an unified fashion, (b) investigate application-domain specific extensions to the formalisms, and (c) identify implementation strategies for practical application of the decision support system as a preference analyzer. The anticipated results will help realize application-specific robust decision support systems in multiple domains, including product-line engineering, safety-critical system development, and goal-oriented requirements engineering, by enabling improved automated reasoning about preferences. This work will contribute to research-based training of a postdoctoral scholar and a graduate student in techniques that cut across software engineering, formal methods and artificial intelligence. Research results will be disseminated through publications in journals and conferences.

自动化决策支持系统可帮助用户在一组替代方案中做出明智且明智的选择，同时考虑用户偏好和多个系统属性之间的权衡。在软件工程领域，决策支持系统用于帮助评估替代设计、技术和管理选择的定量偏好和权衡。对替代方案的偏好可以通过直接向利益相关者征求对每个属性的感知效用/价值的衡量标准，或者通过根据过去的经验和专业知识量化此类效用/价值来评估。然而，在大多数实际设置中，对属性的偏好不能全部量化。另一方面，仅定性地考虑偏好（将它们指定为替代方案之间的简单相对顺序）也是不切实际的。为了克服这些限制，拟议的研究重点是开发决策支持系统的新范式，其中偏好以定性和定量的形式指定。这项工作的主要目标是：（a）开发用于表示和推理的稳健形式主义以统一方式确定定量和定性偏好，(b) 研究形式主义的应用领域特定扩展，以及 (c) 确定决策支持系统作为偏好分析器的实际应用的实施策略。预期结果将通过改进有关偏好的自动推理，帮助在多个领域实现特定于应用程序的稳健决策支持系统，包括产品线工程、安全关键系统开发和面向目标的需求工程。 这项工作将有助于对博士后学者和研究生进行跨软件工程、形式方法和人工智能技术的研究培训。研究结果将通过期刊和会议上的出版物进行传播。