A Decentralized Approach to Distributed Decision Support Systems

Many mission-critical, decision-making situations happen in dynamic, rapidly changing, and often unpredictable distributed environments. Military, governmental, and medical contexts are examples of such situations, which can be characterized by highly decentralized, up-to-date data sets coming from various sources. Unlike other decisionmaking tools, DSS designed for such situations are challenged by the need to access this decentralized information at any time, from anywhere, under tight time constraints. This paper proposes a new approach for distributed DSS in such contexts. Its main contribution consists in confronting the existing knowledge in the area of distributed DSS with new, emerging distributed technologies. It formulates six assumptions leading to a new definition of distributed DSS, which goes beyond traditional Web-based architectures. A real world example illustrates these assumptions.