Efficient interactive budget planning and adjusting under financial stress

Rausch, P., Stahl, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4860-0203 and Stumpf, M. (2013) Efficient interactive budget planning and adjusting under financial stress. In: Thirty-Third SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 10-12 DECEMBER 2013, Cambridge UK, pp. 375-388.

Abstract/Summary

One of the most challenging tasks in financial management for large governmental and industrial organizations is Planning and Budgeting (P&B). The processes involved with P&B are cost and time intensive, especially when dealing with uncertainties and budget adjustments during the planning horizon. This work builds on our previous research in which we proposed and evaluated a fuzzy approach that allows optimizing the budget interactively beyond the initial planning stage. In this research we propose an extension that handles financial stress (i.e. drastic budget cuts) occurred during the budget period. This is done by introducing fuzzy stress parameters which are used to re-distribute the budget in order to minimize the negative impact of the financial stress. The benefits and possible issues of this approach are analyzed critically using a real world case study from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology (NIT). Additionally, ongoing and future research directions are presented.