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Managing a Decision Support System with the Help of Robust Decisions
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There are many answers to the question "What is a decision support system?" Broadly it is "a computer-based system that aids the process of decision making" but this definition is too broad to be of use. There are two main classes of "decision support:" decision space exploration and decision process support. Decision space explorationA decision support system may provide an environment for exploring the range of independent variables to help with the understanding of the system performance. Usually these systems provide support for mathematically modeling the system, an environment that makes it easy to vary the independent variables, and various displays of the results in graphs and plots. The graphical results support making decisions. This ability to explore the decision space is either done a system specifically designed for a class of problems or on a spreadsheet spread sheet. These types of systems only provide only part of the information needed to make a decision. Decision process supportThe process of decision-making requires much more than analytical information about the decision space. The complete decision process is composed of four main steps: understand, evaluate, fuse and decide. Where decision space exploration is invaluable in evaluating alternative courses of action versus the criteria (i.e. goals targets and requirements) develop during understanding, they offer little help in fusing the results and deciding what-to-do-next. Consider an example from a Robust Decisions customer, a manufacturer of rocket engines. This company has extensive capability for analytically modeling different rocket configurations. However, when they began to design a new engine, there is new functionality to model and many requirements that may be qualitative and difficult to model at all. Determining what to evaluate is part of the process. After they have used simulations to explore the decision space, it is the interpretation of the simulations used with qualitative evaluation and must be considered in order to make a decision. A decision process support DSS should be able to help them fuse both quantitative and qualitative results the stakeholder values the interpretation of the quantitative results from various stakeholders. Further, the system should give guidance about what-to-do-next. This, helps the team trade-off the ability to meet one requirement at the expense of another determine whether it's worth reviving the fidelity of the simulations. The Accord suite from Robust Decisions is a decision process support DSS and provides these capabilities. Combining Accord with the capability to explore the decision space can be a very powerful decision support system. 
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