Supporting Strategic Decision Making With Case-Based Reasoning.

Abstract

Making strategic business decisions is one of the most difficult and, at the same time, most interesting issues of management. Decisions of this kind, classically referred to as ill-structured problems, are extremely difficult to support with management information systems. Recent research on solving this type of problems through reasoning by analogy has charted a possible course of development for strategic decision support systems. Applying the case-based reasoning approach in this context seems to be the right research paradigm to create the architecture of such a system. This article presents the current state of research on using analogies in strategic decision making and discusses proposals for architecture of a system exploiting case-based reasoning as well as methods of representing knowledge on a company in such a system. Finally, the results of preliminary experiments are presented which were conducted on the cases of actual companies, demonstrating the ability to automatically retrieve the right cases. The article is closed with a summary of experiment results and the presentation of conclusions in the context of further research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]