Distributed Decision Support Systems: A Federalist Model of Cooperation

Although the DSS community generally shows interest in distributed computing when building decision support systems, the use of distributed technologies often remains limited to extension services added to traditional, local DSS functionalities. In other words, distributed computing rarely change the intrinsic (and local) behavior of the DSS. In this paper, we propose new distributed decision support strategies impacting the very core structures of the DSSs. We present the high-level concepts of an innovative model of cooperation for distributed DSSs, which leverages the possibilities offered by recent distributed technologies. This model allows the development of dynamic, self-formed, self-managed, and self-healing distributed DSSs.