Structured matching: a task-specific technique for making decisions

The authors describe structured matching informally and give a formal definition of the task and strategy of structured matching. Structured matching integrates the knowledge and control for making a decision within a hierarchical structure. Structured matching has several desirable characteristics: it is qualitative and tractable, it facilitates knowledge acquisition and explanation, and it explicitly represents decision-making knowledge. The authors describe how structured matching is implemented in the HYPER tool, showing how HYPER corresponds to the formal definition. HYPER is a tool for building problem-solving modules that measure the fit of a hypothesis to a situation. Structured matching is a generalization of hypothesis matching. The authors present examples of structured matching in several knowledge-based systems.<
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