ABSTRACT

CONTENTS 14.1 Introduction and Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887 14.2 Grounding in Decision Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889

14.2.1 DSS Subsystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891 14.2.2 Web-Based DSS: Key Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893

14.3 Web-Based DBMSs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 895 14.4 Web-Based MBMSs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897

14.4.1 Web-Based Dialog Generation Management System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899 14.4.1.1 Action Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 900

14.4.2 Display Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 902 14.4.3 Knowledge Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 906

14.5 Application: DSS in Business Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 907 14.6 Web-Based DSS: Future Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 908 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 910

ABSTRACT This chapter provides an overview of web-based decision-support systems (DSS) that are seeing a widespread use among decision makers, educators, and researchers in various disciplines and domains: business, natural resource management, medicine, manufacturing, engineering, and many others. The chapter opens with an introduction to DSS, complex systems, and decision theory. It then proceeds to discuss the design of web-enabled DSS and back-end database systems. Next, it addresses the front-end user interface and the intermediate application-layer concepts. In addition, the chapter also covers the topics related to interfacing the model base. The chapter concludes with one important application of DSS in higher education-DSS for management simulation games and a discussion of the future evolution of web-based DSS.