Decision station: a notion for a situated DSS

Despite the growing need for decision support in the digital age, there has not been an adequate increase of interest in research and development in Decision Support Systems (DSSs). In our view, the vision for a new type of DSS should provision a tighter integration with the problem domain and include implementation phase in addition to the traditional intelligence, design, and choice phases. We argue that an adequate DSS in our dynamic electronic era should be situated in the problem environment. We propose a generic architecture for such a DSS incorporating sensors, effectors, and enhanced interfaces in addition to the traditional DSS kernel. We suggest the term "Decision Station" to refer to such situated DSS. We further elaborate on the possibilities to implement situated DSS in different segments of e-business. We argue in favor of using intelligent agents as the basis of new type of DSS. We further propose an architecture and describe a prototype for such DSS.

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