Development of the Model of a Domain Representation in the Decision Support Systems

Abstract

The amount of information to be processed to make effective and informed decisions in the enterprises management in modern conditions of social development necessitates the use of decision support systems (DSS). Systems of this class provide storage and processing of large volumes of necessary information in a certain domain. At the same time, the high dynamism of the modern world leads to the fact that the domain represented in the system may change. This feature of modern conditions of DSS use determines the relevance of ensuring the adaptability of this systems class. This article presents the results of research on improving considered systems adaptability by providing the possibility of the modifying domain model represented in system being without making changes to the software architecture. The studies were aimed at resolving the discrepancy between the requirements of the systems adaptation efficiency to new functioning conditions and the actual duration of the existing adaptation procedures. It is shown that the traditional approach to the model representation, based on the mapping of the domain model in the relational database structure requires the involvement of specialists in the databases development and data access software. Standard procedures for the execution of such applications can take a long time. The approach which assumes that the domain model is stored in a special type of database in which the description of real objects, their attributes, attribute values and relations between them become records in the tables of such a database has been proposed as a solution for the discrepancy. This determines the possibility of the domain model modifying by changing of the tables contents without modifying structure of such database. To determine the such database structure, the domain representation model formalized description based on set theory has been made. The proposed approach is the basis for a software system design, using which will allow to modify the specific domain model directly by decision makers without involving correspond software developers. The primarily implementation area of the proposed solution is data-oriented DSS. Keywords: decision support systems, domain model, description of the object by a set of characteristics, adaptability of decision support systems, modification of the domain model.