The Coast Guard’s KSS project

Since June 1986, the University of Pennsylvania has been under contract with the Coast Guard to provide support for the Coast Guard’s KSS (knowledge-based decision support systems) project. A principal output of the KSS project has been Max, a DSS shell or environment, originally designed to support modeling tasks during decision making for ship acquisition. Max is innovative in a number of ways: (1) it is a document-oriented DSS, (2) Max documents are generalized hypertext documents for which the buttons and linkages to associated information are set up dynamically at run time by the system, and (3) Max contains a model management system, called TEFA, which can represent and evaluate a broad range of models. In addition, TEFA is able to represent a rich body of information about its models and data, and this meta-information is available through the generalized hypertext facilities of system. Max has been delivered to the Coast Guard and is in use. Several important Coast Guard and Navy models have been implemented in Max at very low cost.