Set Of Decision Support Tools Research Articles

Developing a Multilevel Decision Support Tool for Urban Mobility

Decisions on transport policy measures have long-term and important impacts on the economy, environment and society. Transport policy measures can lock up capital for decades and cause manifold external effects. In order to allow policymakers to evaluate transport policies, the developed decision support tool facilitates the evaluation of the multidimensional impacts of the implementation of transport policies. The objective of the decision support toolset presented in this paper is to support transportation planning and design practices based on an integrated transportation analysis of the area of examination to determine the most applicable combination of mobility services. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the interactive decision support tool implemented to help cities and decision makers design their strategies and shape the urban mobility of the future.

Allocating the REDD+ national baseline to local projects: A case study of Cambodia

This study aimed to propose a set of decision support tools to allocate Cambodia's REDD+ national baseline or initial forest reference level (FRL) to local REDD+ projects, based on their forest cover and forest carbon stocks, and the historical deforestation trends in their reference regions. Our samples included 77 hypothetical REDD+ projects and five actual REDD+ projects. To identify reference regions for our samples, a cluster analysis of 127 districts in Cambodia was conducted using the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) algorithm (or k-medoids method). To calculate the baseline amount to be allocated to projects, four allocation methods were proposed. Two methods used ‘snapshot’ variables (i.e., [1] existing forest area or [2] forest carbon stock) and two used ‘change’ variables (i.e., [3] historical forest area change or [4] historical forest carbon stock change from 2006 to 2014). We weighted the baseline by the deforestation risk in 2014. We found that ‘snapshot’ methods tended to allocate more baseline if the project had more forest cover or forest carbon stocks. In contrast, ‘change’ methods tended to allocate more baseline if the project has more forest area loss or forest carbon stock loss between 2006 and 2014 in its reference region. These differences suggest that the ‘snapshot’ methods do not consider the inequity in the amount of baseline allocated to the projects. This inequity stems from the different degree of effort made by project stakeholders to protect their forests. The degree of effort varies depending on the historical deforestation trend in a project's reference region. However, the ‘change’ methods explicitly incorporate the trend into their calculations of baseline allocations. Technically, the ‘change’ method [4] seems to be the desired choice for allocating FRL to local projects; this is because it fits best with the idea of counter-factual thinking using a ‘reference period’ that a national baseline must have under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The ‘change’ methods are less likely to stimulate further deforestation, in a jurisdiction with high forest cover or forest carbon stocks that does not have a REDD+ project, compared with the ‘snapshot’ methods. However, the ‘change’ methods are more likely to face the challenge of political adjustment to balance the reduced emissions from some jurisdictions/projects with increased emissions from the other jurisdictions/projects, compared with the ‘snapshot’ methods. The findings are applicable not only in Cambodia but also in other REDD+ countries that include deforestation as one of the five REDD+ activities, within the scope of their national baseline submission to the UNFCCC. The study's outcomes will facilitate stakeholder dialogue on the proportions of national baseline allocated to sub-national programs/projects by showing the technical and political implications of the proposed allocation methods.

A variant of the split vehicle routing problem with simultaneous deliveries and pickups for inland container shipping in dry-port based systems

In this paper, we will study a typical problem in inland container shipping, concerning the barge transportation of maritime containers between a dry port and a set of seaport terminals. The barges depart from the dry port and visit a set of sea terminals, where containers need either to be dropped off or picked up. The goal is to achieve economies of scale with barges and avoid trucking as much as possible. The decision thus involves finding the best allocation of containers to barges in order to guarantee on-time delivery and meet capacity restrictions. The problem will be modeled as a variant of the split vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickups and deliveries coupled with time features. The model includes parameters that can be tuned to improve barge utilization and travelling distance. A hybrid local search meta-heuristic algorithm, combined with a branch-and-cut solver, will be developed to solve the model. Numerical experiments have been conducted to test the performance of the algorithm and provide solution analysis for practical insights. Real-world data has been collected from a local barge operator based in the Port of Rotterdam region and will be used as input for the experiments. This will result in an in-depth analysis into current planning practices. The proposed framework complements existing models in the literature and contributes to the development of a comprehensive set of decision support tools, which help in the decision-making process for inland terminals.

An interoperable semantic service toolset with domain ontology for automated decision support in the end-of-life domain

In product-diverse, end-of-life (EoL) production lines the relevant markets, competitors and customer bases continuously change as new products are processed. The resale market itself changes with the influx of new products, as well as hardware and software discontinuations. Competitive business decision making is often performed by a human operator and may not be timely or fully informed. These are decisions such as whether to perform a high cost repair or recycle a product or whether to use a batch of parts in repair or sell them on. These decisions can be used to optimise product life-cycle management (PLM) and profit margins. A real-time decision making capability can reduce the risk of performing non-profitable processing. The novel contribution of this work is an interoperable semantic decision support toolset that enables a capability for timely EoL decisions based on complete knowledge on profitability, predicted pricing and cost-of-production. Many decision support systems have been proposed for the EoL domain, but a lack of interoperability and use of unstructured knowledge bases has led to decisions based on knowledge that is not up to date. Using formalised, semantic technologies offers sustainable decision making in this volatile and increasingly competitive domain.

Development of a Pacific Northwest Biochar Atlas: Translating biochar study results into usable grower information

This article explores a set of decision support tools to supply soil scientists, growers, advisers, and others with information to predict how a specific biochar could interact with specific soils to improve soil health and ultimately crop yields. Earn 0.5 CEUs in Soil & Water Management by reading this article and taking the quiz at www.certifiedcropadviser.org/education/classroom/classes/576

An Integrated Landscape Management Approach to Sustainable Bioenergy Production

Integrated landscape management has emerged in recent years as a methodology to integrate the environmental impacts of various agricultural practices along with yield and profitability in a variety of cropping systems. In this study, the Landscape Environmental Assessment Framework (LEAF), a decision support toolset for use in integrated landscape management and developed at Idaho National Laboratory, was used to evaluate the profitability of grain-producing subfields, to determine the efficacy of sustainably harvesting residual biomass after grain harvest, and to determine the efficacy of integrating bioenergy crops into grain-producing landscapes to enhance farmer profitability. Three bioenergy crops, sorghum, switchgrass, and miscanthus, were integrated into non-profitable subfields in four US counties. The manuscript describes in detail the material and methods used to define crop rotations, land management units and practices, subfield units and productivity, grain profitability, sustainability criteria, energy crop integration, and feedstock cost estimation. With the integration of bioenergy crops, the overall annual biomass production rates in the four counties could be increased by factors ranging from 0.8 to 21, depending on the energy crop and county, over the annual residue biomass production rates. By modeling the harvesting of residual biomass and energy crops using geo-referenced, precision harvesting equipment and optimal harvesting paths on individual subfields, the average logistics costs including harvesting of both residual biomass and energy crops were observed to fall well below US DOE’s 2017 goals for biomass feedstock price of US$84/ton or US$92.6/dry Mg. Miscanthus, grown in counties in Ohio and Kansas, provided the maximum potential, among the three energy crops considered, for increment in biomass production and also posed maximum threat to the grain production. Considerable variability was observed in the harvesting and total costs because of the size, shape, and productivity of individual subfields. It was shown that variability in the harvesting costs could be used to down-select non-profitable farms with low harvesting costs and high residue and bioenergy crop yields and to reduce the negative impacts of bioenergy crop integration into croplands on grain production. The results of the assessment suggest that (1) the potential to produce biomass is considerably enhanced when non-profitable grain-producing subfields are replaced by bioenergy crops and (2) the subfield-scale integrated landscape assessment provides a defensible methodology to directly address individual farmer’s profitability, sustainability, and environmental stewardship.

Non Legacy viewpoint for Department of Defense Architecture Framework architectures

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is a key tool used by the United States engineering and acquisition communities. The DoDAF provides a method to organize system engineering information into a series of architecture products, and groups them into different “views” of the system. These viewpoints represent traditional perspectives of system architecture data, such as operations or technologies. With a new release of the DoDAF, it is now possible to create viewpoints that extend the system architecture to include new types of data such as a Human Viewpoint, which includes information about the human component of the system. This “Non Legacy” viewpoint can be used to augment the standard sets of architectural products with human-centered information important to the system description. However, the methodology to include new viewpoints in the DoDAF is not defined. While the DoDAF specification indicates that new data elements can be included in unique architecture products, there is no guidance on how to instantiate these representations while adhering to the DoDAF Meta Model (DM2) data schema. The focus of this research effort was to develop a methodology to implement the Human Viewpoint by extending the DM2 constructs while preserving the integrity of the overall architecture. The proposed methodology includes augmenting the underlying data schema, identifying the format to render the output models, ensuring that the additional views remains linked to the overall architecture, and evaluating the implications of the additional viewpoint. A flexible architecting tool, the Architex Decision Support Toolset, was used as an architecture test-bed to evaluate the feasibility of implementing Non Legacy viewpoints using the prescribed process. The outcome of this work can be extended to provide a general methodology for including other Non Legacy viewpoints with the DoDAF architecture framework.

Towards the development of a decision support system for multi-agency decision-making during cross-border emergencies

Developing decision support systems for emergency situations is a complex and challenging task. These difficulties are compounded further in the case of cross-border emergencies, which often require the coordination and collaboration of independent agencies. These agencies have different structures and resources in place, and follow their own internal policies and procedures. If a number of countries have been affected, agencies may not even share the same language. Large-scale disasters, whether natural, deliberate, or accidental do not respect borders and come with a high risk to human life and a variety of economic and health impacts. Thus, it is the aim of the S-HELP (Securing-Health Emergency Learning Planning) project to develop a decision support tool-set that supports multi-agency decision-making during cross-border emergencies. S-HELP seeks to provide a tool-set that supports rapid and effective decision-making across all stages of the emergency management lifecycle (i.e. mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery). To address the challenges associated with multi-agency emergency management, a holistic framed approach to healthcare preparedness, response, and recovery is proposed. This holistic framework has been created to guide the development of the S-HELP solution. The framework integrates a number of components important in the phased iterative development of an emergency management decision support system, such as, interoperability standards, risk communication, spatial data management, agile development, healthcare responder training, and scenario development for system evaluation.

Development of a geographic information system-based decision support toolset to assess the feasibility of on-site wastewater treatment and disposal options in low permeability subsoils.

Traditional on-site wastewater treatment systems have proven to be unsuitable in areas of low permeability subsoils, representing a risk to human health and the environment. With large areas being covered by low permeability tills, Ireland needs to consider alternative treatment and disposal options to be able to allow further development in these areas and to deal with polluting legacy sites. The paper describes the development and structure of a geographic information system (GIS)-based decision support toolset to evaluate possible alternative strategies for these sites. The programme takes as its initial input the location of an existing house located in an area of low permeability subsoils. Through a series of interconnected GIS geoprocesses the model outputs appropriate solutions for a site, ranking them in terms of environmental sustainability and cost. However, the final decisions are still dependent on on-site constraints so that each solution is accompanied by an alert message that provides additional information for the user to refine the output list according to the available local site-specific information.

Smart Meters, Smart Water, Smart Societies: The iWIDGET Project

Abstract Population growth and economic development are main causes for increases in the demand for freshwater throughout the world. The likely impacts of climate change and increased urbanisation will result in the increase of the share of global water use to satisfy urban demand and will make water security for urban population even more difficult and costly to achieve. iWIDGET is an EU FP7 funded project (2012-2015), aiming to advance knowledge and understanding about smart metering technologies in order to develop novel, robust, practical and cost-effective methodologies and tools to manage urban water demand in households across Europe. The main scientific challenges for iWIDGET are the management and extraction of useful information from vast amounts of high-resolution consumption data, the development of customised intervention and awareness campaigns to influence behavioural change, and the integration of iWIDGET concepts into a set of decision-support tools (‘widgets’) for water utilities and consumers, applicable in differing local conditions, in three case studies in the UK, Portugal and Greece.

Architectural scoring framework for the creation and evaluation of System-Aware Cyber Security solutions

As cyber security threats have evolved, system protection strategies have been forced to as well. The field of System-Aware Cyber Security has introduced a variety of protection strategies and this has prompted the need for a decision support tool set to provide guidance to the system designers. This paper outlines an architectural scoring framework that supports the design and selection of architectural candidates and provides a rigorous quantitative method for the evaluation to aid in the selection of a final architecture. Additionally, this paper outlines the recognized limitations of the proposed approach and provides a brief overview of how those areas for improvement are guiding future research.

A methodology to approach immigrants’ land use in metropolitan areas

This paper proposes a methodological approach to regional and urban planning in order to design, settle and manage a public policy for the attraction, location and distribution of different groups of immigrants. It further develops a set of decision-support tools, including a management information system and an integrated and interactive model in order to: (i) characterize the patterns of residential land used by different groups of immigrants according to their professional features, and respective evolution, (ii) anticipate the location of new immigrants or groups of immigrants that arrive into the studied territory (according to their demographic, economic and professional characteristics, keeping or changing the prevailing socio-economic, planning and territorial structure), and respective evolution, and (iii) monitor the evolution of respective social, economic and professional territorial integration. This methodology and set of tools are applied, as a case study, to the Oporto Metropolitan Area (Portugal). They possess display and simulation functionalities that support the test and implementation of local, regional and urban policy strategic decisions. Once workmanship quantitative and qualitative needs are specified – according to regional overall prevailing strategies – it outlines the socio-economic-professional conditions to welcome and to fulfil the needs of different population groups – through provision of proper housing, infrastructures, equipments and jobs, as well as through governance mechanisms – in the scope of socio-economic sustainability and life quality principles.

MPA design using sliding windows: Case study designating a research area

Coastal managers presently rely on a limited set of decision support tools for designing marine protected areas (MPAs) or subzones. A new approach, defining potential sizes and shapes of MPA boundaries early in the design process, is presented in a case study. A sliding window of the same dimensions as potential boundary configurations was regularly shifted throughout the study area and used to quantify variables representing preferred biophysical and socioeconomic characteristics. The technique offers advantages in spatially restricted areas, areas where habitat connectivity is critical, and situations wherein providing stakeholders with an up-front understanding of potential boundaries is required.

Comparison of Pilot and Automation Generated Lateral Conflict Resolutions

This study compares and contrasts lateral conflict resolutions generated by pilots (with and without a set of decision support tools), with those generated by a fully automated conflict resolution tool that generates optimal (smallest path deviation) resolutions. The conflict geometries investigated were all factorial combinations of three levels of Intruder aircraft speed, three levels of initial Ownship distance to closest approach, and nine conflict angles. The resolution decision support tools included dynamic conflict alerting, which indicated whether a proposed path was conflict free, and a dynamic predictor system that showed a fast time depiction of the proposed resolution trajectories. The automation-generated resolutions, computed using a geometric optimization algorithm, served as a benchmark against which the pilot-generated resolutions were compared. Without decision support tools the pilot-generated resolutions were often ineffective in providing the necessary separation, particularly at smaller conflict angles. The resolutions tended to be effective when the decision support tools were used. Resolution cost, as measured by added path length, was greater for pilot-generated resolutions (averaging 2.7 nmi) compared to the automation-generated resolutions (averaging 1.3 nmi). When pilots had the decision support tools, their strategies, as indexed by whether they turned toward or away from the Intruder, and the mean locations at which they turned back to recapture their original route, tended to be the same as that of the automated system.

A principled approach to the design of healthcare systems: Autonomy vs. governance

In this paper, we look at decision support for post-operative breast cancer care. Our main concerns are to support autonomy of decision making whilst maintaining the governance and reliability of the decision-making process. We describe the context of our work in the wider medical setting. We then present a set of decision support tools based on the situation calculus as a means of maintaining the integrity of rule bases underlying the decision-making system. The decision support system, Neptune, allows for the authoring, maintenance and delivery of decisions in a self-governing framework. Finally we discuss the implications of our work.

Decision Support in the Benefits Consumer Age

Benefits consumerism is a reality. Employees may understand why providers and employers are making this move. But the real test for these plans will come at that point where the consumers actually must adopt and use the new plans. Employers are asking a lot of them, and they are going to need help. The most important component of these new plans is an integrated set of decision-support tools to help them with the new decisions they face, not only to elect the new plan, but to make the best decisions about investment, spending, providers and treatments.

Context evaluation: a profile of irrigator climate knowledge, needs and practices in the northern Murray - Darling Basin to aid development of climate-based decision support tools and information and dissemination of research

Understanding client needs, knowledge and practices offers a means of ensuring research outputs match intended audience requirements. This paper shows the initial impact of context evaluation on the development of a suite of decision support tools and information to help irrigators better manage their water resources under different climatic conditions. The context evaluation study involved a survey of ~170 irrigators in the northern Murray�Darling Basin in Australia. It sought to clarify how they make cropping area and water management decisions and their levels of understanding and use of climate information. We found irrigators consult widely on cropping decisions and those with large areas commonly apply the Southern Oscillation Index to property decisions. Respondents demonstrated a reasonably good understanding of climate phenomena in an Southern Oscillation Index knowledge test. Two-thirds use seasonal climate outlook information, but only 20% are very confident to apply climate information to decisions. More than half would find a decision support system (comprising tools and information) useful for cropping decisions. Almost 75% would change their crop area, and 43% their crop type, if given advance information about water availability up to 4 months ahead of irrigation season. About 70% have access to a computer and half to the internet, but two-thirds consider their personal computing skill is only nil or basic. Twenty-three percent of respondents expressed interest in working directly with the research team to interact regarding their requirements, indicating the potential for future participative research activities such as collaborative, on-farm research. The context evaluation facilitated formation of a focus group that cooperated to assess research findings and incorporate improvements to the project�s set of decision support tools. The evaluation was a new experience for the researchers and, albeit an arms-length consultation process, it has broadened our knowledge about our target audience and their preferred ways to access research findings.

Using Control and Systems Theoretic Concepts to Set Prices of Goods and Services in Competitive Markets

In this paper, we describe how control theoretic methods of modelling, optimisation and learning/adaptation have been used to develop a generic approach to price setting in competitive markets. This generic approach has been incorporated into a set of decision support tools which are now routinely used to set prices of petrol at each petrol station for networks of petrol stations, for the pricing of mobile telephony tariffs as well as for the pricing of goods in mass retailing. Real life examples of the use of these tools are also provided in the paper.

Scheduling the Operation Desert Storm Airlift: An Advanced Automated Scheduling Support System

A typical airlift mission carrying troops and cargo to the Persian Gulf required a three-day round-trip, visited seven or more different airfields, burned almost one million pounds of fuel, and cost $280,000. During Operation Desert Storm, the Military Airlift Command (MAC) averaged more than 100 such missions daily as it managed the largest airlift in history. By August 7, 1991, more than 25,000 missions had moved more than 966,000 passengers and 774,000 tons of cargo to and from the Persian Gulf region. Each mission required scheduling aircraft, crew, and mission support resources to maximize the on-time delivery of cargo and passengers. To meet this challenge, MAC worked with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop and deploy the Airlift Deployment Analysis System (ADANS). Within three months, ADANS provided a set of decision support tools to manage information on cargo and passengers to be moved and the available resources, as well as tools to schedule missions, to analyze the schedule, and to distribute the schedule to MAC's worldwide command and control system.

A Case Study of a Complex System with the Decimas Framework

This paper presents the DeciMaS framework , which supports the vital stages of information system creation. The case study for the DeciMaS framework is also presented. For this reason an agent-based decision support system (ADSS) is created and described in detail. We discuss the structure and the data mining methods of the designed ADSS. The intelligent ADSS described here provides a platform for integration of related knowledge coming from external heterogeneous sources, and supports its transformation into an understandable set of models and analytical dependencies, with the global aim of assisting a manager with a set of decision support tools.