Coordinating advice and actual treatment

The author focuses on identifying the current treatment, allowing time for therapy to take effect, and coordinating the advice with the actual execution of treatment plans. These problems were encountered during the implementation of an expert system for treatment of diabetic ketoacidosis. The programming system, called the temporal control structure (TCS), is a temporal data dependency manager that maintains a temporal database and automatically updates decisions that are based on information that changes. Data can be stored either as point events or as intervals. When an expert system is programmed, the data dependencies of all of the decisions are declared. By tracing the dependency structure, the TCS can assure the complete propagation of information as it arrives and changes. The programmer is relieved of the burden of explicitly calling for the recalculation of affected decisions. The use of the TCS allows the flexible implementation of reasoning systems that manipulate data that arrives during the course of the consultation