Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems combine models, data, and information technology for effective decision-making and are becoming increasingly popular in business and industry. Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems is a comprehensive book that describes how to build data-driven, web-enabled decision support systems using a Microsoft Access database, VB .NET, and an ASP .NET framework and illustrates it using several case studies arising in Management, Engineering, and Operations Research. The main contribution of the book is to present all the techniques needed to build complete decision support systems in a highly accessible manner through numerous hands-on tutorials. This book is ideally suited as a textbook for teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in any branch of science, engineering, and management but can also be used as a supplementary reference book or a self-study manual. The book contains five parts:

Part I - Principles of Good Database Design: This part of the book covers entity-relationship diagrams, creating relational databases, and normalizing databases.

Part II - Database Development with Microsoft Access: This part describes how to create tables using Microsoft Access, establish relationship between tables, and manipulate tables using Access queries or using Structured Query Language (SQL).

Part III - Windows Application Development with VB .NET: The topics for this part include the Visual Studio development environment, object-oriented and visual programming, database connectivity using ADO .NET, and Crystal Report .NET.

Part IV - Web Application Development with ASP .NET: This part illustrates the process of developing web applications by introducing HTML, ASP .NET, and database connectivity in Web applications.

Part V - Case Studies: This part presents several case studies of decision support systems arising in different application settings including Online Book Store, Portfolio Management and Optimization, and Television Advertisement Allocation.

Abhijit A. Pol is a researcher in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His research focus is in the area of databases with special interests in approximate query processing and physical database design.

Ravindra K. Ahuja is a Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is also the President of Innovative Scheduling, Inc., which specializes in building decision support systems for planning and scheduling problems arising in the field of transportation.