Making Good Decisions Quickly

Several disciplines, including artificial intelligence, operations research and many others, study how to make good decisions. In this overview article, we argue that the key to making progress in our research area is to combine their ideas, which often requires serious technical advances to reconcile their different assumptions and methods in a way that results in synergy among them. To illustrate this point, we give a broad overview of our ongoing research on search and planning (with a large number of students and colleagues, both at the University of Southern California and elsewhere) to demonstrate how to combine ideas from different decision making disciplines. For example, we describe how to combine ideas from artificial intelligence, operations research, and utility theory to create the foundations for building decision support systems that fit the risk preferences of human decision makers in high-stake one-shot decision situations better than current systems. We also describe how to combine ideas from artificial intelligence, economics, theoretical computer science and operations research to build teams of robots that use auctions to distribute tasks autonomously among themselves, and give several more examples.