Cyber-physical Systems

6Decisions and Actions

Decision‐making processes are widespread and usually associated with actions as a means of achieving specific objectives. This could be the determination of operating points of industrial machines to maximize their outputs, the selection of the best route in the traveling salesman problem introduced in Chapter 5, or simply the decision to drink coffee before sleeping. This chapter will introduce different approaches to making decisions, being them centralized, decentralized, or distributed, and which are employed to govern actions based on informative data. In particular, we will discuss three different methodologies, namely optimization, game theory, and rule‐based decision. Our focus will be on mathematical and computational methods; examples from humans or animals are presented only as pedagogical illustrations, and thus, we ought to proceed with great care to avoid extrapolating such results. Therefore, one important remark before we start: decision‐making processes are generally normative, and thus, doctrinaire at some level even when they appear to be natural or spontaneous.

6.1 Introduction

Decision is defined in [1] as the act or process of deciding or a determination arrived at after consideration. However, decisions do not exist in the void: they always exist as a mediator between data and action. Hence, decision‐making process refers to the way that decisions are made about possible action(s) given certain data as inputs. Decisions and actions ...