Towards Meta-Synthetic Support to Unstructured Problem Solving

Decision Support System (DSS) aims to provide effective support for solving unstructured, ill-structured or wicked problems as its initial emergence in the late 1960s. The ever-lasting complexity which exists in social world brings a great deal of uncertainties in human activities, mainly for decision makers who are in morass of overwhelming flow of data, information and knowledge but still lacks effective knowledge support. And “people problems” are key reasons of unimplemented goals of DSS instead of technology-related problems, and sometimes increase uncertainties to decision making process. Due to much complexities in those problems, Chinese system scientist Qian Xuesen (Tsien HsueShen) proposed meta-synthesis method to tackle with open complex giant system (OCGS) from the view of systems in the early 1990s. Here, we regarded problems relevant to OCGS are ill-structured or wicked problems. The essential idea of meta-synthesis approach (MSA) can be simplified as “confident hypothesis, rigorous validation”, i.e. quantitative knowledge arises from qualitative understanding. Later MSA is evolved into Hall of Workshop for Meta-Synthetic Engineering (HWMSE) which emphasizes to utilize breaking advances in information technologies. In this paper, we adopt a new paradigm of decision making in a DSS context, which emphasizes the synthesis of perspectives towards problems description and analysis, and actually reflects meta-synthetic support for decision making. Moreover, the HWMSE is a test bed of meta-synthetic support for ill-structured problem solving. Then a simple demonstration on building meta-synthetic support tools for weapon system comprehensive evaluation is given. Those tools mainly fall into two categories: analytical tools for qualitative-quantitative meta-synthesis and argumentation tools for qualitative meta-synthesis. Further research endeavors are also indicated.