Both individual and group decisions are often supported by systems that facilitate, expand, or enhance a decision maker's ability to work with one or more kinds of knowledge. Such knowledge-based systems are called Decision Support Systems (DSSs).
A Decision Support System is a highly flexible and interactive support system that utilizes a knowledge database, decision models, and a decision maker's own insights in order to create "what-if" scenarios that support decision making when problems are unstructured. The models used in DSSs can be built from simple descriptive statistics such as averages, or they can weave thousands of equations to describe the way an object works. These Decision Support Systems are used in order to analyze business data and present it so that users can make business decisions more easily in unstructured decision making situations.
Typical information that a DSS application might gather and present are:
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While the majority of conventional DSSs have been created to help manage primarily descriptive and procedural knowledge, there is a class of artificially intelligent DSSs concerned mainly with the representation and processing of reasoning knowledge. |
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Using spreadsheet programs like Excel to plan out budgets using the what-if function is a good example of scaled-down DSSs in action. |
Decision Support System features include: