Requirements-Based Composition of Tailored Decision Support Systems

Corporate decision makers have individual requirements for decision support influenced by business goals, regulatory restrictions or access to resources such as data. Ideally, decision makers could quickly create tailored decision support systems (DSS) themselves which optimally address their individual requirements for decision support. Although service-oriented architectures have been proposed for DSS customization, they are primarily targeting trained software developers and cannot immediately be adapted by decision makers or domain experts with little to no software development knowledge. In this paper, we therefore motivate an assisted process-based service composition approach which can be used by non-developers to create tailored DSS. For assistance during service composition, we contribute a meta-model for the formalization of both decision support requirements and functionality of decision support services. Models created according to the meta-model can be used to detect mismatches between a decision maker’s requirements for decision support and services selected in the service composition representing a DSS. Furthermore, the formalizations may even be used for automated service composition given a decision maker’s decision support requirements. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our meta-model in the domain of regional energy distribution network planning.