Cross-organisational decision support: An agent-enabled approach

Abstract

Decision support systems (DSS) are typically built for efficiency but fail to address flexibility in support for decision makers in modern organisations. They provide insufficient resources and inadequate support for decision makers to manage the processes for solving complex problems. They are not adaptive to user requirements. The above situation worsens when cooperation or collaboration is needed among decision makers across organisations. As technology progresses, there is an increasing opportunity for addressing these deficiencies. To address these problems we leverage the power of component independence and modelling concepts for designing a DSS framework to support this process. We develop a flexible distributed DSS architecture to realise the proposed framework using an agent paradigm. The architecture is then implemented, refined and validated with a prototype. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.