Towards an approach for developing knowledge based systems for procedure-oriented operations

Operations which are primarily based on procedures and which are designed to monitor conformance to these procedures can be considered to be procedure-oriented. Workers or operators in such environments tend to replace the cumbersome procedures with informal heuristics which, while enabling them to achieve higher efficiency in their operations, also increase the possibility or errors as well as introduce inconsistencies in decision making among the operators. An approach incorporating methods of knowledge acquisition from procedures and methods of capturing, consolidating and modeling procedure-related heuristics can assist in the development of knowledge based systems which can both achieve the efficiency gains and minimize errors and inconsistencies