Model-based evaluation of long-range resource allocation plans

When corporate planning is decentralized, the plans produced by each suborganization must be reviewed and evaluated to make sure they are reasonable and acceptable to the organization as a whole. In this paper we consider three ways of automating the evaluation task: two based on rules combined with qualitative arithmetic, and one based on a microeconomic model combined with quantitative reasoning and a search procedure. We argue that the knowledge encoded in the rules can be represented better using the model and that the search strategy implicit in the rule representation can be duplicated by the procedure. Moreover, quantitative reasoning can deal with reinforcing and counteracting effects, while qualitative arithmetic cannot. This approach has been used as the basis for the REMUS module in the ROME system.