Writing effective use cases

TLDR: The authors indulge in a long-winded literature survey of planning systems and provide proofs of necessity, consistency, and optimality of their framework, that practitioners will no doubt find tiresome as the book is given the flavour of a PhD thesis.

Abstract: which centres on responding to contingencies, there is no digression into languages for detecting contingencies-the reader will need to look to the alarm correlation literature, or to event monitoring frameworks such as the University of Cam-bridge's Cambridge Event Architecture (CEA) and Imperial College's Generalized Event Monitor (GEM), here. In order to integrate event detection with planning though, these event detectors will need extensions for event criticality, event probability , response utility determination and scheduling, and resource allocation. The final chapters of the book review some behaviour models , which characterize the underlying attitudes that may influence planning, such as anti-authorative, impulsive, macho, and liability conscious behavioural attitudes. The authors also explain how computer-generated plans may be used to validate human plans and, similarly, how a comparison to human plans may shed light on the suitability and accuracy of a particular computational approach. The target audience for this book is ambitiously described as software managers, higher level managers, project managers, executives, CIO's, managers, entrepreneurs, and software developers. However, the tone of the book is predominantly academic and theoretic in nature, with frequent excursions into mathematical formulae that are probably not of interest to practictioners. Firstly, the authors indulge in a long-winded literature survey of planning systems and provide proofs of necessity , consistency, and optimality of their framework, that practitioners will no doubt find tiresome as the book is given the flavour of a PhD thesis, albeit a thorough and rigorous one. While the book provides comprehensive coverage of planning approaches and prior research, the book tends to be repetitive and long-wlnded. The book's discussion of the Maruti real-time operating system, though applicable, is not likely to be of interest to the intended audience as Maruti is not a pervasive technology in industry. Finally, the use of academic parlance and frequent references to context free grammars, non-terminals, and NP-completeness is ill-suited to the target audience, who expect a straightforward, brief, and direct explanation of critical concepts, and who will find themselves frequently bored by the many tedious academic expositions. Whilst, as claimed in the book's blurb, the techniques described in the book could foreseeably apply to domains as diverse as web-based shopping assistants, the authors do not provide any practical illustrations of this, constraining their applications predominantly to a recurring examples from the aircraft flight planning domain. The enticing but elusive prospect of integrating real-time problem solving languages with existing Internet …