DESIGN OF A VIEW-BASED DSS FOR LOCATION PLANNING

The traditional approach in DSS falls short of providing a highly inte ractive problem solving environment for planning. Often, cumbersome pr ocedures are required to implement optional plans and obtain feedback information. In dynamic graphic systems, the user is able to view diff erent linked graphic representations (e.g., spatial or statistical gra phs) of statistical data and interact (e.g., selecting items) with the se graphics. In this paper we describe the design of a DSS for plannin g facility locations, which uses principles of dynamic graphics to ach ieve a highly interactive problem solving environment. As in dynamic g raphic systems, the user interacts with the DSS through active and lin ked views. However, where views in dynamic graphics are different repr esentations of a given dataset, the views in the DSS are active data s tructures describing the facility system to be planned from different perspectives. The declarative and procedural forms of knowledge involv ed are identified by a logical analysis of planning problems. A frame- based formalism is proposed to represent the knowledge contained in th e views. The main advantage of this view-based approach is that it off ers the user a highly flexible and interactive environment for perform ing 'what-if' analyses.