Research On Grid Based Open Decision Support Systems

With the rapid development of the Internet and the global economy, the environments for the decision-makers are becoming more complicated. Traditional DSS already cannot satisfy the requirement of the changing environments and practical application. The advent and mature of Grid, that is an advanced technology representing "the third internet revolution", brings about a lot of opportunities and challenges for the development of DSS. The innovative ideas and technologies of Grid make it an excellent platform for the distributed applications. Grid provides a perfect way for the share of the decision resources on the Internet, and can be used to resolve many problems that DSS developers are facing. That bring the Grid technology into the DSS research area will be not only valuable for the development of DSS theory, but also useful in many areas. Thus, this paper proposes the conception of Grid Based Open Decision Support System (GBODSS), does some researches on the basic theory and key technologies of GBODSS, and try to build the framework for the GBODSS's research. This paper illustrates the basic ideas and a concept of GBODSS, points out the core idea of GBODSS is the share and cooperation of decision resources, puts forward a basic architecture of GBODSS and the decision-making workflow of GBODSS, discusses the characters that GBODSS has. This architecture can give a clear whole perspective of GBODSS.GBODSS is a kind of typical distributed systems. To elaborate GBODSS more clearly, reflect the complexity and the dynamic open characters of GBODSS, this paper introduces the MAS technologies into the research of GBODSS modeling, and proposes an improved model of the GBODSS based on the Agent Grid (AGBODSS).Based on the AGBODSS model, a set of methods for analyzing and designing the AGBODSS is proposed. The model of entity agents in Agent Grid is analysed and its mental states is elaborated formally by using branching-time logic. With the role based analysis method, the model of AGBODSS's organization structure and its design method are proposed. A scheme of role assignment is given, which is illustrated with the background of the National Economy Mobilization DSS (NEM-DSS), and some practical assignment models of entity agents are provided. The decision resource management is one of the most important issues of GBODSS research. This paper proposes a novel scheme of decision resource management on the new generation architecture of Grid "OGSA". The scheme takes decision service as its core concept, which is based on the electronic market of decision service. A registry and discovery mechanism of Grid services that is based on semantic is put forward and be used to provide the registry and discovery service for the decision service electronic market. The Ontology design issue in the decision resource management is discussed, with the design of the National Economy Mobilization Ontology as an example.With the background of NEM-DSS, this paper discusses how to apply the theory and methods of GBODSS in a practical field. The system analysis and design of NEM-DSS based on Agent Grid is discussed. A practical realization scheme of the NEM-DSS on Grid environment is proposed with the support of Globus toolkits. Some functions in the former NEM-DSS are realized in the Grid environment. This application has checked the reasonability, validity and technical feasibility of the theory and methods of GBODSS.