Gearing Up: Visualizing Decision Support for Manufacturing

Computer-based Decision Support Systems (DSS) are intended to aid decision makers in collecting information from a variety of sources, in order to identify and solve problems and make decisions. Theoretical possibilities exist of building a DSS in any knowledge domain; notable work has taken place in business, medicine, defense, manufacturing, transportation, forestry, and law. The work described in this paper deals with the design of a DSS based on a mathematical model for an ice- cream manufacturing operation. Ice-cream manufacturing is a useful example because it is a multi- modal system that contains sufficient complexity in the processes to be generalized to many other kinds of operations.