Case-Based Reasoning - An Introduction

Case-based reasoning is a recent approach to knowledge-based problem solving and decision support: A new problem is solved by remembering a previous similar situation and by reusing information and knowledge of that situation. Let us illustrate this by looking at some typical problem solving situations: A physician is examining a patient in his office. He gets a reminding to a patient that he treated two weeks ago. Assuming that the reminding was caused by a similarity of important symptoms, the physician uses the diagnosis and treatment of the previous patient to determine the disease and treatment for the patient in front of him. A financial consultant working on a difficult credit decision task uses a reminding to a previous case, which involved a company in similar trouble as the current one, to recommend that the loan application should be refused. A drilling engineer has experienced several dramatic blow out situations. He is quickly reminded of one of these situations when the combination of critical measurements during drilling matches those of a blow out case. In particular, he may get a reminding to a mistake he made during a previous blow-out, and use this to avoid repeating the error once again.