Retrospect and Prospect of the Influence Diagram

The evaluation algorithm and the application of the influence diagram were surveyed, which argues that to construct an explicit,compact and objective influence diagram is of the most importance. There are two suggested ways for realization of the influence diagram: introducing the achievements of the modern psychology, cognitive science, behavior science, and so on to represent and solve uncertainty to build a well-constructed influence diagram; based on the observed data to build an influence diagram. Also, the limitations of the influence diagram were analyzed, such as that it cannot deal with asynunetric problems efficiently, cannot picture dynamic problems,cannot model the problems with a limitless horizon, and ther is no highly efficient algorithm. And some potential methods to overcome these limitations were pointed out.