Problem Structuring Methods: Brief Overview with Some Examples

Planning and management is increasingly problematic in the real-world environment of spiraling change and uncertainty. Knowledge is incomplete, values are in dispute and the decisions of others are often unpredictable. Problem structuring methods (PSMs) are now a fundamental management skill. It is the process of retrieving information from long-term memory and external memory and using it to construct the problem space, i.e. to specify goals, operators and evaluation functions etc.
The methods which have come, collectively, to be known as PSMs were developed independently from the mid 1960s onwards.…