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If the number of conditions and actions is high (in my case, 12 conditions and 13 actions respectively!), making/maintaining a decision table with hand is proving to be really tough. The number of possible rules in the case at hand is huge (Y/N for 11 conditions and a 3-way choice for the 12th) and it's freaking me out. Also, these conditions and actions cannot be collapsed/coalesced; they are all needed very much.

What could be a better alternative to a decision table? What are some popular free tools to model the same?

Thanks so much.

Joel Coehoorn
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KrishnaChaitanya
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  • I've posted somewhat the same question with an example just now because I felt you where not getting the answers you should've gotten. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5101879/how-to-start-working-with-a-large-decision-table – Peter Feb 24 '11 at 08:06

2 Answers2

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Have a look at ROBDDs.

swegi
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  • Thanks...can you pls. point me to a book that explains creation and reduction of BDDs in a simple way? – KrishnaChaitanya Oct 14 '10 at 12:05
  • The wikipedia article links to some articles and books. – swegi Oct 14 '10 at 12:19
  • By the way, why would an ROBDD be suitable for my model in question? I am not really looking at a binary 0 or 1 answer....I am looking at 8-9 possible actions to be taken based on the combinations of values of 11-12 conditions .... correct me if I am wrong, but an ROBDD doesn't seem intuitive to me here. – KrishnaChaitanya Oct 14 '10 at 12:19
  • You can encode a condition for each action and test them efficiently with ROBDDs. – swegi Oct 14 '10 at 12:27
  • OK - you mean, let the terminal nodes of 0 & 1 stand for "Don't do this action" and "Do this action", and the ordered variables be the conditions that lead up to these 0/1? (Of course, this would lead to 1 ROBDD per action...) - please let me know if I'm right. – KrishnaChaitanya Oct 15 '10 at 08:24
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Statestep might be what you're looking for. Really powerful for dealing with large numbers of possibilities. Not normally free though, unless for education etc.

mecho
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