Decision Support System for John Day Reservoir

A decision support system (DSS) is an

information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...

that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e. unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both. While academics have perceived DSS as a tool to support decision making processes, DSS users see DSS as a tool to facilitate organizational processes. Some authors have extended the definition of DSS to include any

system A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and express ...

that might support

decision making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either ra ...

and some DSS include a

decision-making software Decision-making software (DM software) is software for computer applications that help individuals and organisations make choices and take decisions, typically by ranking, prioritizing or choosing from a number of options. An early example of DM s ...

component; Sprague (1980)Sprague, R;(1980).
A Framework for the Development of Decision Support Systems
" MIS Quarterly. Vol. 4, No. 4, pp.1-25. defines a properly termed DSS as follows: # DSS tends to be aimed at the less well structured, underspecified problem that upper level

manager Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activitie ...

s typically face; # DSS attempts to combine the use of models or analytic techniques with traditional data access and

retrieval Retrieval could refer to: Computer science * RETRIEVE, Tymshare database that inspired dBASE and others * Data retrieval * Document retrieval * Image retrieval * Information retrieval * Knowledge retrieval * Medical retrieval * Music information ...

functions; # DSS specifically focuses on features which make them easy to use by non-computer-proficient people in an interactive mode; and # DSS emphasizes flexibility and adaptability to accommodate changes in the

environment Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, all living and non-living things occurring naturally * Biophysical environment, the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism or ...

and the

approach of the user. DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present includes: *inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts), *comparative sales figures between one period and the next, *projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions.

History

The concept of decision support has evolved mainly from the theoretical studies of organizational decision making done at the

Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...

during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the implementation work done in the 1960s.Keen, P. G. W. (1978). ''Decision support systems: an organizational perspective''. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. DSS became an area of research of its own in the middle of the 1970s, before gaining in intensity during the 1980s. In the middle and late 1980s, executive information systems (EIS), group decision support systems (GDSS), and organizational decision support systems (ODSS) evolved from the single user and model-oriented DSS. According to Sol (1987),

Henk G. Sol Henk Gerard Sol (born 11 August 1951 in Borger, Netherlands) is a Dutch organizational theorist and Emeritus Professor of Business Engineering and ICT at Groningen University. His research focuses on the development of services enabled by ICT, ma ...

et al. (1987). ''Expert systems and artificial intelligence in decision support systems: proceedings of the Second Mini Euroconference, Lunteren, The Netherlands, 17–20 November 1985''. Springer, 1987. . p.1-2. the definition and scope of DSS have been migrating over the years: in the 1970s DSS was described as "a computer-based system to aid decision making"; in the late 1970s the DSS movement started focusing on "interactive computer-based systems which help decision-makers utilize data bases and models to solve ill-structured problems"; in the 1980s DSS should provide systems "using suitable and available technology to improve effectiveness of managerial and professional activities", and towards the end of 1980s DSS faced a new challenge towards the design of intelligent workstations. In 1987,

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

completed development of the Gate Assignment Display System (GADS) for

United Airlines United Airlines, Inc. (commonly referred to as United), is a major American airline headquartered at the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois.

. This decision support system is credited with significantly reducing travel delays by aiding the management of ground operations at various

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surfa ...

s, beginning with O'Hare International Airport in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

and Stapleton Airport in

Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the ...

. Beginning in about 1990,

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integr ...

and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) began broadening the realm of DSS. As the turn of the millennium approached, new Web-based analytical applications were introduced. DSS also have a weak connection to the user interface paradigm of

hypertext Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references ( hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically ...

. Both the

University of Vermont The University of Vermont (UVM), officially the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is a public land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont. It was founded in 1791 and is among the oldest universities in the Unite ...

PROMIS system (for medical decision making) and the Carnegie Mellon ZOG/ KMS system (for military and business decision making) were decision support systems which also were major breakthroughs in user interface research. Furthermore, although

researchers have generally been concerned with information overload, certain researchers, notably Douglas Engelbart, have been focused on decision makers in particular. The advent of more and better reporting technologies has seen DSS start to emerge as a critical component of

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activitie ...

design. Examples of this can be seen in the intense amount of discussion of DSS in the education environment.

Applications

DSS can theoretically be built in any knowledge domain. One example is the

clinical decision support system A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology, provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, to help health and health care. CDSS encompasses a variety of ...

for

medical diagnosis Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information r ...

. There are four stages in the evolution of clinical decision support system (CDSS): the primitive version is standalone and does not support integration; the second generation supports integration with other medical systems; the third is standard-based, and the fourth is service model-based. DSS is extensively used in business and management. Executive dashboard and other business performance software allow faster decision making, identification of negative trends, and better allocation of business resources. Due to DSS, all the information from any organization is represented in the form of charts, graphs i.e. in a summarized way, which helps the management to take strategic decisions. For example, one of the DSS applications is the management and development of complex anti-terrorism systems. Other examples include a bank loan officer verifying the credit of a loan applicant or an engineering firm that has bids on several projects and wants to know if they can be competitive with their costs. A growing area of DSS application, concepts, principles, and techniques is in agricultural production, marketing for

sustainable development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The ...

. Agricultural DSSes began to be developed and promoted in the 1990s. For example, the DSSAT4 package, The Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer developed through financial support of

USAID The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 bi ...

during the 80s and 90s, has allowed rapid assessment of several agricultural production systems around the world to facilitate decision-making at the farm and policy levels. Precision agriculture seeks to tailor decisions to particular portions of farm fields. There are, however, many constraints to the successful adoption of DSS in agriculture. DSS is also prevalent in forest management where the long planning horizon and the spatial dimension of planning problems demand specific requirements. All aspects of Forest management, from log transportation, harvest scheduling to sustainability and ecosystem protection have been addressed by modern DSSs. In this context, the consideration of single or multiple management objectives related to the provision of goods and services that are traded or non-traded and often subject to resource constraints and decision problems. The Community of Practice of Forest Management Decision Support Systems provides a large repository on knowledge about the construction and use of forest Decision Support Systems. A specific example concerns the

Canadian National Railway The Canadian National Railway Company (french: Compagnie des chemins de fer nationaux du Canada) is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN i ...

system, which tests its equipment on a regular basis using a decision support system. A problem faced by any

railroad Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prep ...

is worn-out or defective rails, which can result in hundreds of derailments per year. Under a DSS, the Canadian National Railway system managed to decrease the incidence of derailments at the same time other companies were experiencing an increase. DSS has been used for risk assessment to interpret monitoring data from large engineering structures such as dams, towers, cathedrals, or masonry buildings. For instance, Mistral is an expert system to monitor dam safety, developed in the 1990s by Ismes (Italy). It gets data from an automatic monitoring system and performs a diagnosis of the state of the dam. Its first copy, installed in 1992 on the

Ridracoli 300px, The lake of Ridracoli. Ridracoli is a ''frazione'' of the '' comune'' of Bagno di Romagna, province of Forlì-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna (northern Italy). In the nearby is a 103.5 m-high dam on the Bidente river, with a lake. It is part ...

Dam (Italy), is still operational 24/7/365. It has been installed on several dams in Italy and abroad (e.g., Itaipu Dam in Brazil), and on monuments under the name of Kaleidos. Mistral is a registered trade mark of CESI. GIS has been successfully used since the ‘90s in conjunction with DSS, to show on a map real-time risk evaluations based on monitoring data gathered in the area of the Val Pola disaster (Italy).

Components

Drought Mitigation Decision Support System

Three fundamental components of a DSS

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

are:Haettenschwiler, P. (1999)
Neues anwenderfreundliches Konzept der Entscheidungsunterstützung
Gutes Entscheiden in Wirtschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft. Zurich, vdf Hochschulverlag AG: 189-208.Power, D. J. (2002)
Decision support systems: concepts and resources for managers
Westport, Conn., Quorum Books.Sprague, R. H. and E. D. Carlson (1982). Building effective decision support systems. Englewood Cㄴliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall. Marakas, G. M. (1999). Decision support systems in the twenty-first century. Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice Hall. # the

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

(or

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

), # the model (i.e., the decision context and user criteria) # the user interface. The

users Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

themselves are also important components of the architecture.

Taxonomies

Using the relationship with the user as the criterion, Haettenschwiler differentiates ''passive'', ''active'', and ''cooperative DSS''. A ''passive DSS'' is a system that aids the process of decision making, but that cannot bring out explicit decision suggestions or solutions. An ''active DSS'' can bring out such decision suggestions or solutions. A ''cooperative DSS'' allows for an iterative process between human and system towards the achievement of a consolidated solution: the decision maker (or its advisor) can modify, complete, or refine the decision suggestions provided by the system, before sending them back to the system for validation, and likewise the system again improves, completes, and refines the suggestions of the decision maker and sends them back to them for validation. Another taxonomy for DSS, according to the mode of assistance, has been created by D. Power: he differentiates ''communication-driven DSS'', ''data-driven DSS'', ''document-driven DSS'', ''knowledge-driven DSS'', and ''model-driven DSS''. *A ''communication-driven DSS'' enables cooperation, supporting more than one person working on a shared task; examples include integrated tools like Google Docs or

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace Microsoft SharePoint Workspace (formerly Microsoft Office Groove) is a discontinued desktop application designed for document collaboration in teams with members who are regularly off-line or who do not share the same network security clearance. ...

. *A ''data-driven DSS'' (or data-oriented DSS) emphasizes access to and manipulation of a

time series In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Ex ...

of internal company data and, sometimes, external data. *A ''document-driven DSS'' manages, retrieves, and manipulates unstructured information in a variety of electronic formats. *A ''knowledge-driven DSS'' provides specialized

problem-solving Problem solving is the process of achieving a goal by overcoming obstacles, a frequent part of most activities. Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks (e.g. how to turn on an appliance) to complex issues in business an ...

expertise stored as facts, rules, procedures or in similar structures like interactive decision trees and flowcharts. *A ''model-driven DSS'' emphasizes access to and manipulation of a statistical, financial, optimization, or

simulation A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...

model. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters provided by users to assist decision makers in analyzing a situation; they are not necessarily data-intensive. Dicodess is an example of an open-source model-driven DSS generator. Using scope as the criterion, PowerPower, D. J. (1996). What is a DSS? The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support 1(3). differentiates ''enterprise-wide DSS'' and ''desktop DSS''. An ''enterprise-wide DSS'' is linked to large data warehouses and serves many managers in the company. A ''desktop, single-user DSS'' is a small system that runs on an individual manager's PC.

Development frameworks

Similarly to other systems, DSS systems require a structured approach. Such a framework includes people, technology, and the development approach. The Early Framework of Decision Support System consists of four phases: * ''Intelligence'' – Searching for conditions that call for decision; * ''Design'' – Developing and analyzing possible alternative actions of solution; * ''Choice'' – Selecting a course of action among those; * ''Implementation'' – Adopting the selected course of action in decision situation. DSS technology levels (of hardware and software) may include: #The actual application that will be used by the user. This is the part of the application that allows the decision maker to make decisions in a particular problem area. The user can act upon that particular problem. #Generator contains Hardware/software environment that allows people to easily develop specific DSS applications. This level makes use of case tools or systems such as Crystal, Analytica and

iThink STELLA (short for Systems Thinking, Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation; also marketed as iThink) is a visual programming language for system dynamics modeling introduced by Barry Richmond in 1985. The program, distributed by isee sys ...

. #Tools include lower level hardware/software. DSS generators including special languages, function libraries and linking modules An iterative developmental approach allows for the DSS to be changed and redesigned at various intervals. Once the system is designed, it will need to be tested and revised where necessary for the desired outcome.

Classification

There are several ways to classify DSS applications. Not every DSS fits neatly into one of the categories, but may be a mix of two or more architectures. Holsapple and WhinstonHolsapple, C.W., and A. B. Whinston. (1996). Decision Support Systems: A Knowledge-Based Approach. St. Paul: West Publishing. classify DSS into the following six frameworks: text-oriented DSS, database-oriented DSS, spreadsheet-oriented DSS, solver-oriented DSS, rule-oriented DSS, and compound DSS. A compound DSS is the most popular classification for a DSS; it is a hybrid system that includes two or more of the five basic structures. The support given by DSS can be separated into three distinct, interrelated categories: Personal Support, Group Support, and Organizational Support. DSS components may be classified as: # ''Inputs'': Factors, numbers, and characteristics to analyze # ''User knowledge and expertise:'' Inputs requiring manual analysis by the user # ''Outputs'': Transformed data from which DSS "decisions" are generated # ''Decisions'': Results generated by the DSS based on user criteria DSSs which perform selected cognitive decision-making functions and are based on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

intelligent agent In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or ...

s technologies are called intelligent decision support systems (IDSS) The nascent field of decision engineering treats the decision itself as an engineered object, and applies engineering principles such as

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design' ...

and

quality assurance Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to ensure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design ...

to an explicit representation of the elements that make up a decision.

History

Applications

Components

Taxonomies

Development frameworks

Classification

See also

References

Further reading