A contextual methodology for modeling real-time decision-making support
Résumé
Human behaviour must be described on the four levels known as policy, strategy, tactic, and operation. From the upper level (policy) to the lower (operation), the corresponding decision-making process goes through two successive contextualisations. At the first level, decision making has a fixed part (policy and strategy) and a dynamic part (tactic and operation), at the second level. Real-time aspects of decision making are on the dynamic part, i.e., in strong connection with the context in which an actor makes a real-time decision. We propose a modelling of real-time decision making by a contextual methodology that is composed of a series of 10 steps crossing the four levels. The aim is to support the self-training of actors to modify weaknesses of their behaviour during task realisation. The contextual methodology here proposes a unified framework on aspects that are generally contrasted – procedure versus practice, task versus activity, logic of functioning versus logic of use – and explains the two types of contextualisation in a context-oriented model with three layers. The contextual methodology has been applied in a road-safety domain (in which the car driver is continuously in a situation of real-time decision making) and is now used in another application in Open Source domain.