A decision support system for bureaucratic policy administration: An abductive logic programming approach

A bureaucracy can be viewed as a set of policies that governs the activities of its people. The purpose of these policies is to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency. However, manual administration of these policies is a tedious and often overwhelming task because it is too cognitively demanding to keep track of the complex relationships between the policies. As a result, these policies often consist of many inconsistencies (conflicts) as they evolve because there is no automated means to aid the administrators in detecting inconsistencies. In this paper, we present an approach that uses abductive logic programming for building a decision support system for the administration of bureaucratic policies. The system will help administrators decide the consistency of a policy with respect to the current set of policies and hence, prevent the introduction of inconsistent policies.