Design of a view-based DSS for location planning

The traditional approach in DSS falls short of providing a highly interactive problem solving environment for planning. Often, cumbersome procedures are required to implement optional plans and obtain feedback information. In dynamic graphic systems, the user is able to view different 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 different representations of a given dataset, the views in the DSS are active data structures describing the facility system to be planned from different perspectives. The declarative and procedural forms of knowledge involved are identified 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 offers the user a highly flexible and interactive environment for performing 'what-if' analyses.