Decision support systems

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are a specific class of computerized information system that supports business and organizational decision-making activities. A properly-designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. DSS belong to an environment with multidisciplinary foundations, including database reasearch, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, simulation methods, software engineering and telecomunicationdecision support system, decision makers, computer-based

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems

Autoencoders for strategic decision support

In the majority of executive domains, a notion of normality is involved in most strategic decisions. However, few data-driven tools that support strategic decision-making are available. We introduce and extend the use of autoencoders to provide strategically relevant granular feedback. A first experiment indicates that experts are inconsistent in their decision making, highlighting the need for strategic decision support. Furthermore, using two large industry-provided human resources datasets, the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of ranking accuracy, synergy with human experts, and dimension-level feedback. This three-point scheme is validated using (a) synthetic data, (b) the perspective of data quality, (c) blind expert validation, and (d) transparent expert evaluation. Our study confirms several principal weaknesses of human decision-making and stresses the importance of synergy between a model and humans. Moreover, unsupervised learning and in particular the autoencoder are shown to be valuable tools for strategic decision-making

Cost Decision Support in Product Design

The constraints addressed in decision making during product design, process planning and production planning determine the admissible solution space for the manufacture of products. The solution space determines largely the costs that are incurred in the production process. In order to be able to make economically sound decisions, costing data support must be integrated into the decision making processes. Regarding product design, the designer must be supplied with transparent costing data, that is ready for direct application. In this paper a functional architecture for costing data support during product design, as well as a corresponding data structure are presented

Higher education decision making and decision support systems

The authors illustrate several issues in decision support and decision support systems (DSS), state of the art research in these fields, and also their own studies in designing a higher education DSS. The final section contains our contribution in outlining the modules of the DSS, involving the present systems and databases of FSEGA and UBB, results and activities belonging to FSEGA students, teaching and research staff, to assist decisions for all the actors implicated in the processes, in various specific situations.decision support, decision support systems (DSS), higher education institutions, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)