Metric space of precedents

The experience of operating complex systems, including software, makes it necessary to accumulate and analyze a large amount of information of incident situations and methods of their localization, circumvention and elimination. As a rule, such information exists in form of a set of precedents. There are various methods of precedent analysis that allow an expert to sort and search for the information in this set. The paper formulates an approach to the formalization of precedents and the construction of a metric space of precedents based on a new hierarchical metric.