MM-DSS: Integrating multimedia and decision-making knowledge in decision support systems

Multimedia (MM) information systems have been utilized for decision-making tasks since they were developed in the early 1990s. Few research studies to date have paid attention to the integrated mode of MM information with a decision support system (DSS) or have investigated the role of MM information and DSS from the perspective of model-based knowledge management. This paper proposes a multimedia decision support system (MM-DSS) to address the above unexplored issues. The proposed MM-DSS manages MM information with the use of a newly developed extended attributed relational graph (ARG) and the structured modeling (SM) technique in order to support complicated decision-making processes intelligently and systematically. This paper illustrates the development of the new extended ARG and the SM method, and their integration into mathematical decision-making knowledge. The proposed MM-DSS responds to the needs of representation, storage, and retrieval of MM information in decision-making processes. Results of simulation show that the proposed MM-DSS is successful in tackling an optimization problem of factory scheduling.