IN‐QUOTES: a knowledge‐based system for supporting decision making in weakly structured domains

In complex and weakly structured domains, decision makers often employ multiple techniques, including quantitative modeling and reasoning from past experiences, to address the problem at hand. As such, there has been a call for more research on developing systems that merge problem‐solving approaches, such as reasoning from past experiences, with other paradigms to provide support for both the unstructured and structured aspects of the decision‐making process. Development of these systems is dependent on acquiring and modeling the knowledge and expertise inherent in the process and then representing and implementing it in an appropriate form. However, in weakly structured domains, knowledge acquisition may be better described as knowledge ‘co‐creation’ in which the expert and system builder work together to understand the process and lend as much structure to it as possible. In this paper, we propose that the integration of principles drawn from the paradigms of case‐base reasoning, expert systems, and object‐oriented programming facilitates this process by providing a powerful approach to acquire and model knowledge in a weakly structured domain. We demonstrate this approach through the development of a system designed to assist a decision maker in the performance of a difficult, somewhat unstructured design and planning task. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.