Integrated Decision-Making Based on OLAP
Background
In a decision-making context, analysis is an intellectual process that allows generating knowledge from hypotheses and data. This can be formalized by explaining a phenomenon and proposing solutions or recommendations for decision making. To make that analysis applicable, OLAP system as a BI (business intelligence) technology, appears among the most adequate multidimensional analysis tools most used by decision makers and analysts who need to transform data into actionable information, which has the effect of facilitating the management of the performance of organizations and having a clear vision of their activities at all times and in real time.
Moreover, the economic and business intelligence (BI) tools, especially OLAP systems, are considered among the best technologies most eminent and most powerful in the environment of decision support systems. In fact, OLAP systems are at the heart of many economic analysis applications, and appear as complete systems providing useful and necessary services for efficient, rational, and analytic processing of data. The functionalities of these systems, based on a multidimensional database approach, are characterized by the ability to support efficient and flexible exploration of multidimensional cubes in data warehouses.
Several studies have been conducted around the theme of OLAP technology reflecting its degree of importance and effectiveness to be implemented in multiple business intelligence areas. In fact, in a decision-making context, OLAP system is a relatively well-mastered technology when it comes to simple data, which explains its ability to be easily integrated with other environments such as cloud computing and Big Data. Nevertheless, the complex consequences of certain decision-making situations necessitate taking into account the multicriteria and conflicting aspects of data, as well as the consideration of several types of data (quantitative and qualitative) in order to represent adequately all the necessary information for making decisions. However, OLAP tools that exist in decision-making area still suffer from limitations related to the lack of technical means to consider the multicriteria and imprecise nature of decision data in the analysis process.
To improve the analytic capabilities of OLAP systems, several researchers have proposed incorporating decision support techniques such as integration of information networks; integration of association rules; new methods for modeling OLAP cubes, etc. However, these contributions do not take into account the qualitative preferences of decision makers and the multicriteria aspects of certain decision-making situations. To support these limitations, multicriteria analysis and fuzzy analysis are the most appropriate tools to provide complementary analysis to the OLAP process. On the one hand, multicriteria analysis methods are used to deal with complex decision-making situations involving multiple, often conflicting, criteria. These methods are characterized by their way of modeling the preferences of decision makers and the possibility of weighting the criteria. On the other hand, fuzzy analysis techniques allow taking into account fuzzy and imprecise decision data.
It is therefore necessary to explore the advantages of multicriteria analysis and fuzzy analysis techniques in order to meet the new requirements of decision makers and analysts who use decision-making systems by proposing the most appropriate solutions. These should be a natural extension of the analytic capabilities of OLAP systems.
The aim of this contribution lies in the context of critical decision-making situations where strategic decision support is generally characterized by the presence of several difficulties that are mainly related to the multicriteria and complexity aspects of these decision-making situations, the amount of data to be considered, and the understanding of the evolution of the values of evaluation criteria over time. The decision support requires, then, greater synergy between several analytic and technical decision-making tools, in order to achieve satisfactory results to the needs of decision makers.
To this end, we propose a software implementation based on OLAP systems and multicriteria analysis to concretely test the intake of the proposed solutions. This implementation is composed of two interfaces. The first one, entitled AMCD interface, is a web application dedicated to collective decision-making that allows the computation of the importance weight of the evaluation criteria, based on the algorithm of the geometric mean procedure of the FAHP method. This assessment is carried out via a group of decision makers using a linguistic scale for evaluation. The second interface, called OLAP_MML, is a Java application dedicated to online analysis of alternatives based on the evaluation criteria derived from the data cube model. The weights of the criteria calculated via the AMCD interface and the alternatives analyzed via the OLAP_MML application are taken as input variables in the Visual Promethee program, integrating the PROMETHEE multicriteria analysis method. The latter program helps to simplify the final assessment of alternatives by allowing decision makers to intervene during the analysis process when making decisions. According to the literature review, the study of software integration modes, such as the MCA and OLAP tools, shows that there are three modes: full coupling, tight coupling, and loose coupling. Since our prototype is based on interactions between the different entities that compose them, we opted for loose coupling (incomplete integration). This mode requires that the software elements of our prototype remain completely independent, and the communication between them is carried out via an intermediate system.
This paper is organized as follows. The "Research methodology" section discusses our research methodology and develops our proposed prototype. In the "Application" section, we describe the case study devoted to solve the selection problem of the most appropriate itineraries for the transport of chemicals in the industrial region of Casablanca. Finally, the "Conclusion" section contains some concluding remarks.