Model-Solver Integration in Decision Support Systems: A Web Services Approach

As complex mathematical models are increasingly adopted for business decision-making, many decision makers have difficulty in selecting compatible solvers (i.e., model solving algorithms) for a model and adequately applying them to the model. This paper presents a model-solver integration framework that enables a decision support system to autonomously suggest the compatible solvers and to apply them to the model, even though the users are not knowledgeable enough about all the details of the models and the solvers. In developing the framework, this paper adopts a Web services approach for the integration of the models and solvers created on different modeling paradigms by encapsulating individual solvers as Web services. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +82-2-958-3650; fax: +82-2-958-3604. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Lee), [email protected] (S. Huh).