The Study Of Service Based Decision Support Systems

The development and its widespread application of modern information technology have been trying to support, and meanwhile drive enterprise management reform. Informatization not only impacts the enterprise structure reform and the business process reengineering, but also rebuilds and integrates the relationship between the enterprise and its partners.Due to the fierce market competition, the scale of organizations keeps expanding while the business complexity grows. During the information era, the decision making, as the key of enterprise management, faces at least three challenges.1) The increasingly complicated decision environment. Decisions shoud be made across the boundaries of systems, departments and even enterprises.2) The ceaselessly improved decision demands. Decisions should be made more quickly and adapt to the dynamic changing business requirements with no higher cost.3) The more and more abundant decision resources. The pervasive existent large amount of data and legacy systems turn the difficult points of decision making from data acquiring to information processing.The decision support system (DSS) aids decision makers through computers and software. As one of the main topics of informatization, the enterprise decision support system helps support and drive enterprise reform. However, no matter how it is composed, the traditional decision support systems, with the tight components coupling and non-standard interfaces, often neglect the common sense that both requirements and targets of decision are sometimes indeterminate. They are not capable of flexible decision with the lack of capabilities such as interoperation, reorganization and extendibility. Traditionally, the DSS generator needs to be introduced while extending the specific DSS, which costs greatly but only brings about limited extensions.The appearance of Service Oriented Computing (SOC) technology in 1990s could settle the problems of rigidity and closeness of traditional DSS. Here, different with the concept in the domain of Service Management, the service in SOC denotes the basic reusable software component with specific business functions and standard interfaces. This paper reconstructs traditional DSS architecture using SOC, and moreover proposes the Service based Decision Support System, i.e. SBDSS. In SBDSS, distributed and heterogeneous business components are encapsulated and provided in the form of services. With the loosely components coupling, SBDSS could dynamically select, adapt, compose and invoke the inner service components, and therefore be easily integrated into the distributed enterprise computing environment through the way of information integration and application coupling with reduced cost.This paper first presents the hierarchical conceptual model and implementation model for the framework of SBDSS, which is divided into the following five layers: the interaction layer, the service composing layer, the service layer, the component layer and the resource layer. The service layer contains many fundamental, standard and replaceable software units. In the service composition layer, different atomic services could be selected from the service layer and then be arranged to produce the problem resolving services. As for the implementation model, SBDSS adopts Service Component Architecture for service modeling, the Service Data Object for data and message modeling, the Business Process Execution Language for service assembly respectively, and finally integrates the different units with the help of JBI based Enterprise Service Bus.The paper further studies the issues related with the data management under the service context. It introduces the Message Based Data Synchronization and Integration Model which resolves the data conflicts by setting and comparing the predefined confidence values for different data sources of both the Master Data and the Business Data. It also gives the multidimensional data analysis framework based on the XMLA protocol, called xDAF. The client program could issue the XMLA requests over SOAP to xDAF and receive the responses from xDAF. With the introduction of soft reference of objects in aggregation pools and materialized views, xDAF boosts its performance for multidimensional data query greatly, which is proved by the related experiments.Since the friendly and flexible decision making environment is regarded as one of the best facilities which could be provided to the decision maker, the paper then presents the flexibility model of DSS which consists 4 layers as the flexibility of adaption, the flexibility of reconstruction, the flexibility of service and the flexibility of integration. The paper pays the particular attention to the approach of reconstruction flexibility and the service flexibility. The general DSS framework is proposed to support the rapid reconstruction. It realizes the default behavior for the specific DSS, which could be then extended if necessary. For the service flexibility, the mechanism of inversion of control is proposed to help service instances flexibly composed and easily integrated into SBDSS with the aid of the assembly model of SCA and Spring Framework.Finally the paper introduces the implementation of prototype for the service based labor market decision support system and verifies the above proposed theory. The system employs Apache Tuscany as the SOA runtime and Apache ServiceMix as the ESB container. It provides the multi-dimensional analysis engine for labor market themes and the general data mining algorithms of classification, clustering and association to conduct the feature analysis, the structural analysis, the transferring analysis and the trend analysis of the demand and supply to support decision making in the administration of regional labor resources. The system could be introduced to provide the decision support for labor administration. In addition, some parts of the system could also be used to help enterprise human resource planning.This paper achieves the following innovative points through the study of service based DSS, especially focusing on its fundamental features, framework structure and flexibility mechanism.(1) It presents the hierarchical model, conceptual model and implementation model for the framework of Service Base Decision Support System.(2) It introduces the Message Based Data Synchronization and Integration Model which resolves the data conflicts by setting and comparing the predefined confidence values for different data sources of both the Master Data and the Business Data.(3) It gives the multidimensional data analysis framework based on the XMLA protocol, called xDAF. With the introduction of soft reference of objects in aggregation pools and materialized views, xDAF boosts its performance for multidimensional data query.(4) It presents the layered DSS flexibility model and pays the particular attention to the approach of the reconstruction flexibility with the predefined general DSS framework, and the approach of the service flexibility with the mechanism of inversion of control and the assembly model of SCA and Spring Framework.The study of service based decision support system has significant practical values. Its achievements could be adopted to construct the next generation of decision support system, which helps the decision makers adapt to the dynamic changing decision environments and demands in the flexible, agile and fast manner, and access more abundant decision resources across department and enterprise boundaries. It could then eventually support and drive the enterprise management reform.