Trade-offs in Decision-theoretic Planning

Decision making under uncertainty can be viewed as a planning task, because it basically amounts to determining a sequence of actions that is optimal for a problem under study. Many different formalisms are used in decision making under uncertainty, with many di erent restrictions enforced. In this paper, a novel, general decision-theoretic planning framework is proposed, and used to analyse various representation formalisms for decision making. Several features of these formalisms are highlighted in terms of the framework, using examples from the domain of cancertreatment planning in medicine