Design of a View-Based DSS for Location Planning

The traditional approach in DSS falls short of providing a highly interactiveproblem solving environment for planning.Often, cumbersomeprocedures are required to implement optional plans and obtain feedback information. In dynamic graphic systems, the user is able to view di€ erent linked graphic representations (e.g., spatial or statistical graphs) of statistical data and interact (e.g., selecting items) with these graphics. In this paper we describe the design of a DSS for planning facility locations, which uses principles of dynamic graphics to achieve a highly interactive problem solving environment. As in dynamic graphic systems, the user interacts with the DSS through active and linked views. However, where views in dynamic graphics are di€ erent representationsof a given dataset, the views in the DSS are active data structures describing the facility system to be planned from di€ erent perspectives. The declarative and procedural forms of knowledge involved are identi® ed by a logical analysis of planning problems. A frame-based formalism is proposed to represent the knowledge contained in the views. The main advantage of this view-based approach is that it o€ ers the user a highly ̄ exible and interactive environment for performing ẁhat-if ’ analyses.