Line Up Column Line Up Row DETAILED BUDGET

FRM is an experimental, knowledge-based system that assists in the judgmental aspects of budget planning and financial resource management. Problem solving in this domain requires many kinds of knowledge from many sources. We represent domain knowledge uniformly as constraints and view resource management and planning problems as constraint satisfaction and resolution tasks. We sketch here the financial resources management problem, our approach, and early results, concentrating on constraint representation and management issues in the system. Preparing and managing budgets are knowledgebased activities that require substantial expertise to do well. These are constraint satisfaction tasks, in the abstract, where the constraints are symbolic as well as numeric, and are judgmental as well as definitional. They are large tasks in which the organization of knowledge is critical to their success. The FRM system* is a prototype working program that attempts to integrate many of the tasks an intelligent financial assistant should perform beyond the bookkeeping that a spreadsheet program does with numerical relations. Tt is an object-oriented system in which hierarchical organization among constraints, as well as among budget items and budgets themselves, is an important design principle. We use the same mechanisms to represent a hierarchy of perspec1This work was funded in part by: DARPA under contract N00039-86-C-0033; Boeing Computer Services under contract W266875; a gift from Price Waterhouse Technology Centre; Lockheed Missiles and Space Company under gift l-72-LO31; NASA under cooperative agreement NCC2-274; and NIH under grant RR-00785. 2 FRM runs on Xerox 1186 machines and is implemented in the CLASSIHYPERCLASS object-oriented programming system [SmithR 86, Schoen 831. CLASS and HYPERCLASS are trademarks of Schlumberger Technology Corporation and were formerly known as STROBE and IMPULSE respectively. tives under which to view the same financial information in different ways. Because of the nature of budgeting tasks, it is important also to represent temporal segments of budgets implicitly as sub-budgets and reason with them just as arbitrary collections of line items can be considered as sub-budgets. A uniform interface is provided by a form-filling system that is itself driven by constraints on how to present information under a perspective. While constraints, perspectives, and hierarchies are the central themes of our work to date, we also include in FRM, and briefly report on, a replanning system that adjusts finished budgets in light of new information and an explanation system that presents audit trails or explanations under specified perspectives. FRM also includes a distributed database utility in its design, but not in its current implementation. Figure 1 shows the major components of the FRM system that are described in subsequent sections.