Modeling operations management support systems

A new class of intelligent support systems called Operations Management Support Systems (OMSS) is described. OMSS comprise a generic class of complex, intelligent support systems which fall in the intersection of applications from decision support systems (DSS) and expert systems (ES). The characteristics of OMSS are compared with DSS and ES. Successful development of OMSS requires an abstract model and an environment based on the model that can be used for their prototyping and incremental development.; This research develops such an abstract model for OMSS called the Smart Object Model (SOM). The model is based on the concept of smart objects where each object has an interface, attributes and methods, and supervisory control knowledge. Supervisory control knowledge provides assistance to the application methods concerning how to utilize knowledge in special control situations. The model provides the mechanism to model these control abstractions at different levels of abstraction.; The syntax and semantics of a language which implements the high-level architecture of SOM in the context of sequential control flow (S-SOM) is presented. The workings of the model/language and its strength and capabilities are demonstrated in the representation of a control problem that captures the steps involved in bagging grocery items. The model is used to represent a prototype OMSS for nuclear power plant operations that captures the various types of knowledge associated with an operation that affect decision making.