Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper focuses on the representation of procedures in a case-based reasoner. It proposes a new method, the multicase, where several examples are merged without generalization into a single structure. The first part of the paper describes multicases as they are being implemented within the FLOABN project (Alterman, Zito- Wolf, and Carpenter 1991) and discusses some properties of multicases, including simplicity of use, ease of transfer between episodes, and better management of case detail. The second part presents a quantitative analysis of storage, indexing and decision costs based on a decision-tree model of procedures. This model shows that multicases have significantly reduced storage and decision costs compared to two other representation schemes.