Suhl, Leena

Voß, Stefan

English

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BISE – EDITORIALAn Introduction to the SpecialFocus Issue “Decision Analytics”The AuthorsProf. Dr. Leena Suhl ()DS&OR LabUniversity of PaderbornWarburger Straße 10033098 PaderbornGermanysuhl@dsor.deProf. Dr. Stefan VoßInstitute of Information SystemsUniversity of HamburgVon-Melle-Park 520146 HamburgGermanystefan.voss@uni-hamburg.dePublished online: 2014-04-09This article is also available in Ger-man in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Suhl L, VoßS (2014) Eine Einführung in dasSchwerpunktheft „Decision Analyt-ics“. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi:10.1007/s11576-014-0415-5.© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden2014DOI 10.1007/s12599-014-0324-6Nowadays information systems allow the use of large amounts of digital, structureddata for decision making. The power and ability of hardware and software has been sig-nificantly increased. Related information and communication technology (ICT) pro-vides a competitive advantage in various fields, such as supply chain management, lo-gistics, marketing, and telecommunications, to name just a few. It incorporates andlinks to information systems, planning tools for decision support as well as support-ing devices. While modern ICT systems are vital components in decision making, theirsuccessful management rests on coordinated decision making using analytical methods.Decision analytics is the research and application area comprising theory, method-ology, and practice to analyze and support important managerial decisions in a formalmanner. The methods include models for optimization of one or more goals, decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, techniques of risk analysis and risk assess-ment, techniques for facilitating group decision making, as well as software and ex-pert systems for decision support. Special tools can be used for representing and for-mally assessing important aspects of decisions, so that they help decision makers toleverage the knowledge hidden within organizational data. Tools implemented withICT involve data mining, optimization, simulation, pattern recognition, prescriptivemethods, predictive modeling, and performance management.This special focus issue strives to explore the synergies between decision analytics andinformation systems. The call for papers published in Issue 1/2013 led to a high amountof more than 30 submissions. After a reviewing process with several revisions for mostsubmissions, four papers were finally selected for publication in this special focus issue.Furthermore, the special focus issue contains an interview with Dan Dolk and ChristerCarlsson, both of whom are since many years well-known experts in decision analyticsand information systems.The authors Köpp, von Mettenheim, and Breitner of the first article, study the re-search question “How can an adequate visualization enable decision analytics for to-day’s ensemble forecast methods?” and present research results showing how heatmapscan be used to visualize multi-stage forecasts that have been computed with Histori-cally Consistent Neural Networks (HCNN). The forecast information can be intuitivelypresented to a decision maker, simultaneously exploiting all distribution information.Through visualization of distributions with all possible outcomes the forecast outputis made much easier to interpret for the human decision maker than with traditionalpresentation techniques.In the paper “Robust Multi-criteria Service Decomposition in Information Systems”the authors Ramacher and Mönch discuss software service compositions to implementbusiness processes in an environment with service-oriented architecture. The servicesto be composed are selected based on functional requirements and their quality. Theapproach can be described as Quality-of-Software-aware service selection and can bemodeled as an NP-hard multi-criteria optimization problem. The article presents amulti-criteria, metaheuristic-based solution approach for the service selection prob-lem, where the algorithm is designed to determine a Pareto frontier of alternativeservice selections in a reasonable amount of time.The article by Cleophas and Ehmke examines decision analytics for logistics net-works, especially for last-mile deliveries within a city. Due to the ongoing growth ofe-business, online retailing is a fast growing sector and needs new planning methodsfor last-mile deliveries that are often considered to be expensive and inefficient. Theauthors argue that in order to be profitable, e-commerce businesses need to maximizethe overall value of fulfilled orders, rather than their number, simultaneously limitingthe costs of delivery. The paper presents an iterative solution approach that combinesmethods from revenue management and cost-minimizing routing. Actual delivery re-quests are accepted or rejected, aiming to maximize the overall value of orders giventhe computed transport capacity.Business & Information Systems Engineering 3|2014 129BISE – EDITORIALThe fourth paper written by Santos-Arteaga, Di Caprio, and Tavana, focuses on theinformation acquisition strategy of individual decision makers. The aim is to select in-formation in such a way that it prevents the decision maker from regretting his or hercurrent decision. The authors introduce a new idea of value of information that relatesto the regret that may arise from the potential choices made by a decision maker. In-formation will be considered valuable if it prevents the decision maker from makingthe choice that he or she would be willing to make given the information that is cur-rently available. Numerical simulations illustrate the behavior of decision makers whenconsidering the value of information within the information acquisition process.We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to all the authors and numerousreviewers for their valuable contributions that have led to an interesting, high-qualityspecial focus issue. The selected articles give an idea of how rich and multifaceted re-search in decision analytics and information systems can be. There were further high-quality contributions among the submissions, and we expect to be able to publish morearticles from this research field in subsequent issues of the BISE journal.130 Business & Information Systems Engineering 3|2014

An Introduction to the Special Focus Issue “Decision Analytics”

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An Introduction to the Special Focus Issue “Decision Analytics”

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