DATA-DRIVEN USER INTERFACE GENERATOR FOR A GENERALIZED MULTIPLE CRITERIA DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM.

It has been a long-standing goal of decision support systems to integrate data management, model management, and user interface facilities into a uniform user interaction environment. This problem is addressed in the context of decision support systems for multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). A hierarchy of abstraction levels is proposed to guide the user through the steps of choosing a decision problem and an MCDM method, creating an input decision matrix, and executing the model. Data and model management information is extracted from the user in a sequence of screens. The format of each screen is generated from the answer to a query that in turn is generated from user responses to higher level screens. The integration of such a data management and extraction process with the actual model execution is illustrated by an example.