An architecture for the deployment of mobile decision support systems

The widespread use of mobile computing devices offers the opportunity of supplying decision support systems, targeted at specific situations and operated at the point of decision. Unfortunately, the computing environment within which such systems are deployed is radically different from the environments in which decision procedures are most easily designed. We summarise experience in reconciling these differences, using a general architecture but working in a specific domain (forest management). This required us to reconcile the constraints of the mobile computing device (limited resources, small touch-screen, support far procedural programming languages only) with the ability to rapidly select and configure different decision procedures for deployment in differing management conditions. We managed to reconcile these conflicting demands by taking advantage of the restricted forms of inference needed in the domain, making it possible to combine declarative and procedural aspects of the problem in a reliable way. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.