Decision support system

A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

[4] In 1987, Texas Instruments completed development of the Gate Assignment Display System (GADS) for United Airlines.

[5] Beginning in about 1990, data warehousing and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) began broadening the realm of DSS.

Due to DSS, all the information from any organization is represented in the form of charts, graphs i.e. in a summarized way, which helps the management to take strategic decisions.

A growing area of DSS application, concepts, principles, and techniques is in agricultural production, marketing for sustainable development.

[8] For example, the DSSAT4 package,[9] The Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer[10] developed through financial support of USAID during the 1980s[citation needed] and 1990s, has allowed rapid assessment of several agricultural production systems around the world to facilitate decision-making at the farm and policy levels.

All aspects of Forest management, from log transportation, harvest scheduling to sustainability and ecosystem protection have been addressed by modern DSSs.

In this context, the consideration of single or multiple management objectives related to the provision of goods and services that are traded or non-traded and often subject to resource constraints and decision problems.

A problem faced by any railroad is worn-out or defective rails, which can result in hundreds of derailments per year.

Under a DSS, the Canadian National Railway system managed to decrease the incidence of derailments at the same time other companies were experiencing an increase.

DSS has been used for risk assessment to interpret monitoring data from large engineering structures such as dams, towers, cathedrals, or masonry buildings.

For instance, Mistral is an expert system to monitor dam safety, developed in the 1990s by Ismes (Italy).

GIS has been successfully used since the '90s in conjunction with DSS, to show on a map real-time risk evaluations based on monitoring data gathered in the area of the Val Pola disaster (Italy).