Real time expert advisory systems: Considerations and imperatives

Automated assistance of system control-related decision making in complex real time environments poses important design and analysis problems and draws attention to fundamental issues in systems science. These issues are elementary but theoretically very rich. However, they are not well integrated in the literature for the purposes of decision support system engineering and are often very technically specialized. This paper outlines some of those problems and issues in the context of real time decision support systems and in so doing attempts to be fundamental and yet informal.