Iain Boyle

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.

Engineering design: perspectives, challenges, and recent advances

This paper provides a review of papers published in the Journal of Engineering Design from 2007 to 2008. Included are the different perspectives on key challenges existing within, and state-of-the-art technologies developed as solutions to current design issues. The intention of this paper is not to provide detailed coverage of all the papers published over the last two years, but rather to provide an overview of research efforts focusing upon key research streams and to illustrate trends within design research and practice.

Towards the Realization of an Integrated Decision Support Environment for Organizational Decision Making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a standalone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This article proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re-configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi-tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co-ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations.

Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a standalone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This article proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re-configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi-tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co-ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations.

Creation dependencies of evolutionary artefact and design process knowledge

As design progresses, artefact and process knowledge often evolve together. However, there is very limited knowledge on the true nature of the dependencies between these two elements of knowledge. This paper presents the first attempt to clearly define ‘creation’ dependencies, which cause a change in design knowledge. Three data analyses were used to identify the dependencies: two were in-depth protocol analyses of a single student product design project and a senior ship designers daily work, and a third was a quantitative questionnaire analysis involving seven experienced complex system designers from industry. The analyses revealed a set of 52 previously unknown creation dependencies between artefact and design process knowledge with commonality found in only 5, with additional dependencies being identified that were specific to the design being studied. Different frequencies of dependency occurrence and particular dependency loops were identified. In addition, the importance and role of domain knowledge were explicitly revealed. The described research highlights the need for further work to provide a more comprehensive definition of the nature of evolutionary artefact and design process knowledge dependencies. Identification of these dependencies offers a significant opportunity to develop tools and techniques with an enhanced ability to support ‘what–if’ analyses during design.

The impact of resources on decision making

Abstract Decision making is a significant activity within industry and although much attention has been paid to the manner in which goals impact on how decision making is executed, there has been less focus on the impact decision making resources can have. This article describes an experiment that sought to provide greater insight into the impact that resources can have on how decision making is executed. Investigated variables included the experience levels of decision makers and the quality and availability of information resources. The experiment provided insights into the variety of impacts that resources can have upon decision making, manifested through the evolution of the approaches, methods, and processes used within it. The findings illustrated that there could be an impact on the decision-making process but not on the method or approach, the method and process but not the approach, or the approach, method, and process. In addition, resources were observed to have multiple impacts, which can emerge in different timescales. Given these findings, research is suggested into the development of resource-impact models that would describe the relationships existing between the decision-making activity and resources, together with the development of techniques for reasoning using these models. This would enhance the development of systems that could offer improved levels of decision support through managing the impact of resources on decision making.

An integrated environment for organisational decision support

The challenges and requirements associated with the provision of organisational decision support are presented with the aim of supporting the through-life development of network enabled capability (NEC) systems. These requirements were compiled through a review of pertinent literature as well as through a series of workshops held with the industrial sponsor of this research - BAE Systems. An architecture is described here for organisational decision support that was developed from the requirements and was subsequently used to create a prototype integrated decision support environment (IDSE). The IDSE was developed incrementally, adding functionality relating to the provision of organisational decision support (DS) with the performance evaluation after each development stage. A scenario and associated case-study were developed within the NECTISE project and presented here, which allowed the demonstration and evaluation of the first prototype IDSE within four separate live simulations. The evaluation feedback from BAE Systems and the Ministry of Defence representatives suggests that the architecture and prototype implementation of the IDES for the provision of organisational decision support are both relevant and mature for future industrial application.

A critical realism view of design artefact knowledge

Design artefact knowledge elements and their relationships have been presented in previous work. Aiming to explore the existence of these elements from a critical realism view, this paper presents a new model of function-behaviour-structure (CR-FBS) based on protocol analysis of a design project. Three fundamental artefact knowledge elements, i.e., function, behaviour, and structure, and their causal relationships are re-presented in the CR-FBS illustrating the recursive nature of artefact knowledge evolution. These elements are presented as being distributed across three design artefact knowledge spaces: expected, instantiated, and interpreted. The critical realism perspective has highlighted that rather than being inherent in all of the three spaces, function only exists in the expected and interpreted design artefact knowledge space, and structure only exists in the expected and instantiated design artefact knowledge space. Consequently, causal relationships among function, behaviour, and structure are limited to where the three fundamental artefact knowledge elements exist.