ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to report on an experimental knowledge-based system called Japanese Energy Supply Security Expert (JESSE) that models some aspects of Japanese energy policy decision making. JESSE performs the complex information-processing task of constrained decision making, which involves the tasks of threat recognition, constraint formulation, and reactive planning. Decision-making behavior of political units s the result of interactions between these political and information-processing mechanisms. Alternative models proposing a collection of actors could be modeled using JESSE-like constructs, but the interaction of the actors is modeled by political mechanisms largely modeled in other languages that have the expressiveness for the pushes and pulls of political accommodations. The chapter presents an information-processing analysis of the decision-making task and propose a functional architecture for the JESSE system. It discusses the issues of knowledge, inference, control, and implementation of JESSE, including the distributed artificial intelligence aspects of our model.
