کد مقاله کد نشریه سال انتشار مقاله انگلیسی نسخه تمام متن
1032885 943268 2011 8 صفحه PDF دانلود رایگان
عنوان انگلیسی مقاله ISI
The tactical use of constraints and structure in diagnostic problem solving
موضوعات مرتبط
علوم انسانی و اجتماعی مدیریت، کسب و کار و حسابداری استراتژی و مدیریت استراتژیک
پیش نمایش صفحه اول مقاله
The tactical use of constraints and structure in diagnostic problem solving
چکیده انگلیسی

This paper presents a prescriptive account of diagnostic problem solving, or diagnosis, in quality and process control. This paper identifies a general strategy, named branch-and-prune, whose manifestations can be found in disciplines such as medical diagnosis, troubleshooting of devices, and model-based diagnosis in artificial intelligence. The work aims to offer a clear conceptualization of this strategy, based on the notions of structures for the search space, and constraints to the cause's nature.The idea is to treat the search space of candidate explanations as a tree structure, in which general and high-level causal directions are branched into more specific and detailed explanations. Constraints eliminate all but a few branches (pruning), which are explored in more detail. We enumerate eight generic structures as a basis for branching the search tree. We demonstrate that our conceptualization in terms of structures and constraints gives a rationale for generally known methods and heuristics in quality engineering and operations management. The paper contributes a unifying conceptual understanding of a class of diagnostic techniques, and it improves the strategy's operationality by offering generic structures, and a simpler and more flexible account of its working. A description of a real-life quality problem solving effort forms a tangible basis for the discussion.

Research highlights
► This paper clarifies a class of strategies for diagnostic problem solving.
► General causal directions are branched into more specific explanations.
► Evidence eliminates all but a few branches (pruning).
► Well-known methods are shown to exploit such a branch-and-prune strategy.
► Eight generic structures are proposed for branching the search tree.

ناشر
Database: Elsevier - ScienceDirect (ساینس دایرکت)
Journal: Omega - Volume 39, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 702–709
نویسندگان
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