Aggregating Across Multiple Levels of Granularity to Meet Customer and Organizational Query Requirements

A research organization responds to a variety of customer requests. Each high level request is broken down into a set of low level requests. For each low level request, the research organization follows a multi-step process: access, acquire, analyze and report. The customer is given an estimate of whether its request will be met, and if not, why not. The explanation may be provided at multiple levels of granularity including request level (e.g. low level request X cannot be fulfilled) and step level (e.g. the problem lies with acquisition). Available databases contain an incomplete history of past requests as well as information about current staffing and resources. The challenge is to provide an estimate of current capabilities for satisfying requests in general and to estimate the probability for meeting a specific incoming