Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

A layered multiagent decision support system for crisis management

Decision Support Systems are powerful tools to help support making decisions. However, they are known to be customized for a specific purpose and can rarely be reused. Moreover, they do not support complex situations sufficiently. Our work addresses this challenge and consists in building a DSS that aims to help emergency managers to manage cases of crisis. The DSS is designed to be flexible and adaptive, so that it may be applied on different subjects of studies and whose behaviour may change with the change of its environment. We endowed it therefore with a multiagent layered core whose role is to represent dynamically and in real time the current situation, to characterize it and to compare it with past known scenarios. The final result of the DSS will help decision-makers to analyze the current crisis and its possible evolution. The RoboCupRescue simulation system is chosen as a test bed to illustrate and to test this approach