Ballast Water Management Decision Support System - Global Maritime Transport and Ballast Water Management: Issues and Solutions - page 223

What Is a Decision Support System
A Decision Support System (DSS) is a supporting tool enhancing a decision-making
process (Bhatt and Zaveri 2002 ). DSSs use a combination of models, analytical
techniques, and information retrieval to help developing and evaluating appropriate
decision alternatives (Adelman 1992 ; Sprague and Carlson 1982 ; Sojda 2007 ).
Today DSSs are widely used to support decision-making processes in business,
social sciences, medicine, politics, games, information technologies, transport
(Marquez and Blanchar 2006 ), and they are major components in environmental
management and science (Denzer 2005 ).
Decision-makers are frequently faced with the problem to take decisions on very
complex issues, which requires large data inputs, and a timely decision process.
DSSs provide decision makers with a tool to reduce uncertainties (Graham and
Jones 1988 ), and to simplify and speed-up the decision process.
Decision Process and Decision Support System
One of the critical factors in the decision making process is subjectivism induced by
the decision-maker (Paradice 2006 ). Decisions are infl uenced by subjectivity mostly
because different decision-makers have varying levels and different background,
knowledge, skills, moods, etc. The use of a DSS from this point of view is important,
because, by principle, it eliminates subjectivity impacts of different decision-makers
in the same process, which leads to more consistent results - i.e., decisions. It also
ensures consistency of decisions taken by the same decision-maker. However, the
DSS is exposed to subjectivity during the preparation/construction process. The
results of a decision-making process may further be infl uenced (sometimes this is
almost anticipated) by the authorities that order a DSS, i.e., they would like to achieve
a certain result of their interest.
Another critical point is the transparency of a decision process. DSS should be
constructed in such a way that decision models as well as decision steps are trans-
parent, thereby enabling a review of the decision process at any time in the future.
This is especially critical when a DSS is used in a regulatory framework.
Any errors possibly resulting from a decision process should also be known.
Errors could occur in view of exactness and accuracy. Exactness means that a step
of the process, or the process itself, in certain instances (e.g., lack of data, reli-
ability of data, precision of data, subjective impacts), could produce a biased
(false) result. Accuracy means that the result of a step in the decision process, or
the process itself, may have a certain discrepancy or deviation as a consequence
of certain instances (e.g., lack of data, reliability of data, exactness of data, sub-
jective impacts). Hence, the DSS should produce exact answers with an accept-
able accuracy.