MARS: A mergers and acquisitions reasoning system

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are currently revolutionizing the structure of corporate U.S.A. and annually involve deals totalling billions of dollars. Consequently, it is an area of intense activity and interest within the financial community. The process of planning an M&A is enormously complex and involves sophisticated reasoning and planning, by several parties such as the raider, the target company, investment banks, etc. Computer based tools are often invaluable for planning several stages of an M&A, such as generating forecasted cash flows. Current computer aids for M&A however do not provide adequate support for many essential features such as real time planning, reasoning under uncertainty, nonmonotonic inference, case-based reasoning, etc. MARS is a prototype M&A reasoning tool developed at General Electric Corporate R&D that attempts to provide such features in an integrated environment. MARS both simulates and provides advice regarding the complex reasoning and planning involved in an M&A deal. In doing so, it provides an excellent test bed architecture for the testing, development and integration of several ideas from artificial intelligence. MARS is implemented in COMMON LISP using RUM 15] on top of KEE 18]. RUM, a development environment for reasoning under uncertainty is based on Bonissone's theory of plausible reasoning 2–4] and was also developed at General Electric Corporate R&D.