Many marketing problems, such as the design of marketing communication campaigns and the development of new products, require creative solutions. Such problems are typically weakly-structured and underspecified (open-ended). The authors investigate the potential of analogical reasoning as a...

This paper discusses a decision support system for airline and railway crew planning. The system is a state-of-the-art branch-and-price solver that is used for crew scheduling and crew rostering. We briefly discuss the mathematical background of the solver, of which most part is covered in the...

In this paper, we describe an extension of the methodology for explanation generation in financial knowledge-based systems, offering the possibility to automatically generate explanations and diagnostics to support business decision tasks. The central goal is the identification of specific...

An effective Decision Support System (DSS) should help its users improve decision-making in complex, information-rich, environments. We present a feature gap analysis that shows that current decision support technologies lack important qualities for a new generation of agile business models that...

At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the...

The purpose of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) systems is to provide a framework for the analysis of multidimensional data. Many tasks related to analysing multidimensional data and making business decisions are still carried out manually by analysts (e.g. financial analysts, accountants,...

The roster planning process at the Dutch security firm NVD was traditionally carried out by hand. A few years NVD was traditionally carried out by hand. A few years ago, because of changing labor laws in the Netherlands, this became practically impossible. We developed a decision support system...

In this case the Dutch Flower Auctions (DFA) are discussed. The DFA are part of the supply network in which flowers are produced, stocked, and then sold through either mediation or auctioning. This case focuses on the buyers’ and auctioneers’ positions when flowers are traded...