A New Vision for Distributed Decision Support Systems

Many mission-critical, decision-making situations happen in dynamic, rapidly changing, and often unpredictable distributed environments. Military, governmental, and medical contexts are examples of such situations, which can be characterized by highly decentralized, up-to-date data sets coming from various sources. Unlike other decisionmaking tools, DSSs designed for such situations are challenged by the need to access this decentralized data at any time, from anywhere, under tight time constraints. This paper proposes a new vision for distributed DSSs in such contexts. Its main contribution consists in confronting the existing knowledge in the area of distributed DSSs with new, emerging distributed technologies. It formulates six assumptions leading to a new definition of distributed DSSs. An example scenario illustrates these assumptions.