>From Pat Nathan

Hi Dan,

: What do you think of DSS and Expert Systems?
 
I think both can help managers. Expert Systems provide one source of 
technologies for building Decision Support Systems -- I call them 
Suggestion DSS. Integration of Expert System technologies may occur in 
some other types of DSS.

: What are the difference between the two?

DSS is a broad category -- Data-Driven DSS, Model-Driven, 
Communication-Driven, Document-Driven and Knowledge-Driven or Suggestion 
DSS. The later category uses Expert Systems tools.

: Would the evolution of DSS end up in Expert Systems?

NO, I don't think so. -- BUT Knowledge-Driven DSS or Suggestion DSS
will become more common and more powerful. The tools are getting better.

A good reference on integrating DSS and Expert Systems is El-Najdawi, M. 
K., and Anthony C. Stylianou, "Expert Support Systems: Integrating AI 
Technologies", Communications of the ACM, New York: Association for 
Computing Machinery, December 1993.

El-Najdawi and Stylianou feel both DSS and Expert Systems "can be used 
to facilitate and improve the quality of decision making by reducing 
information overload and by augmenting the cognitive limitations and 
rationality bounds of decision makers." They concluded "A small number 
of systems have adopted the idea of DSS/ES integration." 

A major contribution is that El-Najdawi and Stylianou identify several 
forms of integration that have been discussed in the literature. The 
major approaches to integration are:

* Expert System integration into various DSS components,

* Expert System integration as a separate component of the DSS,

* DSS models and data access as a component of an Expert System.