Intelligent Support for Selection of COTS Products

Intelligent Decision Support is considered in unstructured decision situations characterized by one or more of the following factors: complexity, uncertainty, multiple groups with a stake in the decision outcome (multiple stakeholders), a large amount of information (especially company data), and/or rapid change in information. Support here means to provide access to information that would otherwise be unavailable or difficult to obtain; to facilitate generation and evaluation of solution alternatives, and to prioritize alternatives by using explicit models that provide structure for particular decisions. Integration of commercial off the shelf (COTS) products as elements of larger systems is a promising new paradigm. In this paper, we focus on the selection of COTS products. This is characterized as a problem with a high degree of inherent uncertainty, incompleteness of information, dynamic changes and involvement of conflicting stakeholder interests. A semi-formal problem description is given. We derive requirements on Decision Support Systems for COTS selection and discuss ten existing approaches from the perspective of those requirements. As a result, we propose an integrated framework called COTS-DSS combining techniques and tools from knowledge management and artificial intelligence, simulation and decision analysis.