Patent ID: 9740978
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: G06F,G06N

Claim:
1. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a computing device, causes the computing device to: receive a planning problem for testing and treatment of a patient in a hospital and an integer value k indicating a number of top plans to be identified for the planning problem; generate a set of top-k plans with at most size k, wherein the set of top-k plans is with respect to a given measure of plan quality, wherein the plan quality is measured by a cost of a plan, wherein each action in the plan is associated with an action cost encompassed in the cost of the plan, and wherein generating the set of top-k plans with at most k is performed by applying Eppstein's shortest paths algorithm to find k shortest paths in a state graph from a node corresponding to an initial state to a goal node; cluster each plan in the set of top-k plans based on a similarity between plans such that each cluster contains similar plans and each plan is grouped only into one cluster thereby forming the set of top-m clusters; and present a representative plan from each top-rn cluster to the user, wherein the representative plan is a minimum cost plan in the top-m cluster.