Decision Support System

Decision Support Systems
Marek J. Druzdzel and Roger R. Flynn
Decision Systems Laboratory School of Information Sciences and Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 {marek,flynn}@sis.pitt.edu http://www.sis.pitt.edu/∼dsl

To appear in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Second Edition, Allen Kent (ed.), New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2002

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Contents
Introduction Decisions and Decision Modeling Types of Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human Judgment and Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modeling Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Components of Decision Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decision Support Systems Normative Systems Normative and Descriptive Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decision-Analytic Decision Support Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Equation-Based and Mixed Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . User Interfaces to Decision Support Systems Support for Model Construction and Model Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 7 8 10 11 11

Support for Reasoning about the Problem Structure in Addition to Numerical Calculations 11 Support for Both Choice and Optimization of Decision Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graphical Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary 12 12 12

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Introduction
Making decisions concerning complex systems (e.g., the management of organizational operations, industrial processes, or investment portfolios; the command and control of military units; or the control of nuclear power plants) often strains our cognitive capabilities. Even though individual interactions among a system’s variables may be

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