Decision-making. Terms and definitions

Abstract

Decision-making is directly connected with purposeful human activity. All people are engaged in this process on a daily basis both personally and using automatic or automated systems. The paper considers the issues of decision-making technology in automatic and automated systems, identifies the main stages of decision making: data – information – knowledge – decision making – decision implementation. There are defined terms «data», «information», «knowledge», «decision», «implementation» which are used at the stages of decision making and decision implementation in automated and automatic control systems. In the paper, there are provided definitions of automatic and automated systems, robots as a separate class of automatic systems, as well as the next stage of development of robots – self-organizing automatic machines which are independently configured to perform various target functions based on the rules of acquiring knowledge. Some features of large systems such as industry or state are noted. For such systems, it is impossible to get all the necessary data about the processes that take place in them. Therefore, the information obtained as a result of their processing will not provide enough knowledge for decision-making on system management. Missing knowledge can be obtained thanks to the unformalized knowledge of people. The definition of unformalized knowledge is provided as well. The paper forms the principles of building automated and automatic systems using artificial intelligence and describes the sequence of control processes in any automatic or automated control system