Decision Support Ecosystems: Definition and Platform Architecture

Decision support systems are crucial in helping decision makers to quickly identify optimal business decisions in increasingly volatile and complex business environments. However, the ideal DSS for one decision maker may not optimally address the requirements for decision support of another decision maker. This is due to differences between decision makers in business goals, regulatory restrictions or availability of resources such as data. By using a suboptimal DSS, decision makers risk implementing suboptimal decision recommendations which endanger the success of their business. This presents DSS developers with the challenge to implement a customizable DSS which can be tailored to the individual requirements for decision support of a single decision maker. In order to address this challenge, we suggest a decision support ecosystem in which DSS developers, decision makers and other domain experts collaborate using a shared platform to provide and combine reusable decision support services into a tailored DSS. The contribution of our paper is twofold: First, we define the concept of a decision support ecosystem with respect to existing digital business ecosystems and discuss expected benefits and challenges. Second, we present a reference architecture for a shared platform supporting the realization of a decision support ecosystem. We demonstrate our contributions in the example application domain of regional energy distribution network planning.