Stanford Heuristic Programming Project December 1978 H PP-78-26

A program for selecting antibiotic therapy is described that makes sophisticated recommendations and provides simple, useful explanations of its reasoning for a user. Our method is to structure the therapy optimization problem in terms of local and global solution criteria that are applied in a generate-and-test algorithm. Generation of therapy recommendations is directed by a fixed, ordered set of canonical instructions that describe the global characteristics of a recommendation. Other factors are dealt with in a "planning" phase particular to each organism for which therapy is to be prescribed, and the test phase that incorporates patient considerations such as allergies and age. We demonstrate the advantages of this canonical form for explanation, comparison of alternative recommendations, and a simple instructive capability.