RADAR: automated task planning for proactive decision support

ABSTRACT Proactive Decision Support aims at improving the decision making experience of human decision-makers by enhancing the quality of the decisions and the ease of making them. Given that AI techniques are efficient in searching over a potentially large solution space (of decision) and finding good solutions, it can be used for human-in-the-loop scenarios such as disaster response that demand naturalistic decision making. A human decision-maker, in such scenarios, may experience high-cognitive overload leading to a loss of situational awareness. In this paper, we propose the use of automated task-planning techniques coupled with design principles laid out in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community for developing a proactive decision support system. To this extent, we highlight the capabilities of such a system RADAR and briefly, describe how automated planning techniques help us in providing the varying degrees of assistance. To evaluate the effectiveness of the different capabilities, we conduct ablation studies with human subjects on a synthetic environment for making an interactive plan of study. We found that planning techniques like plan validation and suggestions help to reduce planning time (objective metrics) and improves user satisfaction (subjective metrics) compared to expert human planners without any support.