Worldwide real-time decision support systems for electronic commerce applications

We report on a new type of decision support system (DSS) that facilitates the decision‐making process in the context of electronic commerce. We restrict our attention to one class of DSS that uses operations research (OR) tools as a decision aid to present the user a proposed solution. Using OR tools for electronic commerce requires the software to be built differently than for isolated OR applications in the past. We show how open DSS will exploit the concept of domain specificity. Domain‐specific tools are employed for the modeling function, the data management function, and for the solution algorithm of the system. We illustrate our approach with a case study developed for a financial application using the World Wide Web. We also outline the role of electronic brokerages and the economic drivers for the open DSSs.