Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
testing and evaluating the performance of different plans, prior to their actual execu-
tion. Nowadays, evaluation of different alternative solutions is worthy to identify the
option(s) that are economic, social and environmental sustainable. In most cases,
traditional analytical methods are unable to fully address these issues.
Business intelligence (BI) tools comprise a set of analytical, statistical and artificial
intelligence techniques along with sophisticated graphical technologies enabling deci-
sion makers to transform their available (huge amount of) data into timely and accu-
rate information for decision making. Therefore, simulation and BI tools can be
viewed as complementary tools for supporting decision making. However, only a few
attempts to make use of effective operations research (OR) technologies (e.g. simula-
tion) along with BI capabilities of historical data analysis has been reported in the
literature. For example, Sabbour et al. [1] use visual interactive simulations coordi-
nated with BI to support decisions at the strategic level. They also present the
essential top-level managerial requirements that would transform strategic decision
simulation into an integral component of BI systems, in the field of supply chain
management. This paper intends to do basically the same, i.e., to propose a conceptual
framework for a decision support system (tool) integrating both technologies, simula-
tion and BI, in a similar fashion as [1], but focused on a specific field of transporta-
tion (Demand Responsive Transport - DRT).
1
That is, this paper proposes an
integrated decision support system (IDSS) targeted to support decision makers in
designing and implementing a DRT system, by investigating the impacts of alterna-
tive specifications of such system on its viability and sustainability for a given area.
A literature review is provided in Section 2 on actual decision support tools, along
with a systematization of the performance measures that are relevant to transportation
systems, and therefore to be used as the output of the proposed advanced BI tool.
Since BI is a relatively new concept for the OR community, Section 2 also introduces
such concept, reports some examples of tools that are commercially available, and
generally describes their main functionalities. The focus of this work is on the pro-
posal of a comprehensive framework for a what-if simulation based BI decision sup-
port system, and this is the matter of Section 3, where particular emphasis is done on
a specific proposal to tackle DRT design and planning modelling tasks. Section 4
discusses the relevance of this proposal, and Section 5 illustrates some forms of visu-
alization to enhance the effective and efficient use of the data and information avail-
able. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the main conclusions of this work.
2
Literature Review
Existing simulation tools aim at strategic or tactical decisions, and rarely are used for
operational decision making. In this sense, the key idea of simulation is to execute a
model repeatedly, allowing the estimation of statistical measures, such as averages,
standard deviations and their confidence intervals. As a result, analysts will foresee
1
Basically, both approaches were developed independently, since the authors of this paper
became aware about the referred work only in the final stage of completing this paper. More-
over, our paper is an extension of our own recent work [2-3].
