A comparative study of methodologies for designing intelligent decision support systems

In this paper, we describe a comprehensive study conducted to understand the methodologies which are being used to design intelligent decision support systems (IDSSs) and to identify the key methodological problems and benefits with using these methodologies. This comprehensive study consists of two parts. The first part is two surveys which together identify the design methodologies being used by a group of IDSS developers and how acceptable they believe their methodologies were for designing their IDSSs. The second part is a comparison of six major formal IDSS design methodologies recently published in the literature and which are not yet known to many developers. This paper is presented to assist IDSS developers in understanding what support can be gained from using existing design methodologies and hence choose the correct one for their project. Furthermore, the paper may be used by IDSS developers to compare the way that they work with the approach proposed by other developers.