Research on the GIS-based Business Decision System Chenyuan Ren, Wen Wang*, Huijin Luo School of Environmental and Natural Resources Renmin University of China, 100872 Beijing, China * Corresponding author:
[email protected] Abstract—This paper comprehensively integrates the techniques of the Geographic Information System (GIS), the Decision Support System (DSS), SD, the Artificial Intelligence, distributed networks and spatial visualization based on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and the Market Information System (MKIS) , We first proposed the concept of GBDS (GIS-based Business Decision System). We discuss the technological method of the GBDS serving for business management and decision making, which also benefits to extend the application of the GIS in social science especially in the field of commerce both in theory and practice. Keywords-gis-based business decision system; geographic information system; decision support system ; business intelligence
I.
INTRODUCTION
Business decision making is an item of the work that must be carried out before one enterprise conducts any investment or production. However, the ubiquitous factors from the raw data to the analytical system affecting business decision making weaken the reliability of decision conclusions. It is always a focus of the enterprises to reduce the bad impact factors and to increase the credibility of the decision making analytical conclusions. The emergence of the Geographic Information System (GIS) brings a newly improving method into the commercial field, which is complete integrating the important position-based data into the business decision making analysis. Although this method has been greatly applied overseas [1], it is uncommon in China. Thus, this paper attempts to propose a GIS-based business decision making system model according to Chinese real situations, and copes with the problems of information insufficiency and imperfect analysis in the traditional business decision making on two aspects of data sharing and deep analyzing. Data sharing is a radical means to improve the efficiency of business decision making. The majority of domestic business data are owned by government agencies and research institutions, which is different from other countries’ situation. Also, the data usually exists in the Intranet so that it is difficult to have free access the data from the Internet. This situation adds the enterprises’ cost for data collection when they make business decisions. Each enterprise will do the same work repeatedly before decision making, leading to a large number of data re-gaining in the field of commerce and the implicit costs as well as lowing the efficiency of business decision
This research is funded primarily by grants from National High Technology Research & Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. 2006AA120103 & No. 2006AA06A307), Ministry of Science & Technology of China.
making. The decision system proposed by this paper uses the distributed databases to integrate the data existing in all associations and governments of the society, then to conduct certain information classification processing, and finally to export the data to an analysis platform providing a base for the commercial enterprises making business analyses and decisions [2]. The application of the GIS analytical method in the domain of commerce makes the former level analysis based on twodimensional time extend to the deep analysis based on threedimensional time. In brief, it is to consider the impact factors related to the positions in the business decision making more reasonably, and to use the method of the spatial analysis for taking into account these impact factors, resulting in more scientific and rational business decision conclusions. This paper takes advantage of component-based integration system to combine the traditional analytical method [3] with the GIS spatial analytical method, which will cause business decision making more intelligent. Moreover, business decision making is often faced with plenty of the data mining work. If a system does not have a high efficiency in data mining, the progress of the whole business decision making will be directly influenced. Thus, the paper attempts to make use of the Agent technique to integrate business intelligence into the decision making process, greatly improving the analysis rate and depth of business analysis. II.
METHODS
A.
The GIS-based Business Decision System (GBDS) The traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a kind of business management software, which focuses on integrating one enterprise’ goods and materials resources management (materials flow), human resources management (human flow), financial resources management (money flow) and information resources management (information flow), Although the ERP provides a platform on the aspect of the enterprise’ resource management, it is unable to influence the enterprise’ commercial behaviors. The Marketing Information System (MKIS) is a system used for tracking, collecting and transferring the basic repeatedly marketing survey information periodically, continually and systematically[4,6,8]. The goal of MKIS is to
find the enterprise’ every possible problem and opportunity in time at the early stage of the problems emerging. However, it is the decision support system (DSS) that plays a really important role in the business behaviors [5]. The DSS is a kind of computer application system to assist decision makers to conduct semi-structured or unstructured decisions in the way of human computer interaction based on the data, the model and the knowledge. The DSS is an advanced information management system deriving from the Management Information System (MIS). The DSS provides an environment for decision makers to analyze the problems, establish the models, simulate the decision making process and plans, and chooses to use all kinds of information resources and analytical tools, assisting decision makers to improve the efficiency and quality of decision making[7]. Since the concept of decision support system was proposed in the 1970s, the DSS has been greatly developed. Sprague in 1980 put forward a three components structure (dialogue, data and model components) of the DSS, and defined the basic components of the DSS, which significantly facilitated the development of the DSS [9]. In the late 1980s, the DSS starts to be combined with the Expert System (ES), forming the Intelligent Decision Support System (IDSS). The IDSS achieved full potentials of both advantages of the ES which solves the qualitative analysis problems in the form of knowledge reasoning and the DSS which solves the quantitative problems in the core of modeling calculation. The IDSS integrated the qualitative quantitative analysis, which makes a large development of the ability and scope to cope with the problems. The IDSS is a new stage of the DSS. In the mid of 1990s, the new technology of the Data Warehouse (DW), the On-Line Analysis Processing (OLAP) and the Data Mining (DM) emerged, and from then on “DW+OLAP+DM” gradually became the concept of the new decision support system. As a result, the IDSS was called the traditional decision support system. The advantage of the new decision support system is to gain the information and knowledge assisting the decision making from the data, which is completely different from the traditional decision support system using the model and knowledge to assist decision making. The traditional and new decision support systems are two different kinds of approaches to assist decision making. They should not be substituted by each other but be integrated. . The DSS combining the DW, OLAP, DM, the model base, the database and the knowledge base, that is the integration of the traditional and the new decision support system, is a more advanced decision support system and thus becomes the Synthetic Decision Support System (SDSS) [10]. With the popularization of the Internet and the application of the GIS in the domain of the social science, the GIS-based DSS in the network environment will emerge in the new structured form. So, we first proposed this conception, The GIS-based Business Decision System (GBDS), The GBDS takes both advantages of the traditional GIS, MKIS and new decision support system SDSS to assist business decision making.
The decision factors of the GBDS such as the spatial data resource, the model resource and the knowledge resource as the sharing resources will be provided complicated and sharing services on the network in the form of the distributed servers, while the position information will be taken into account as an important part of decision making, opening up a new road to the DSS. The GBDS in the network environment is the trend and direction of the decision support system. GBDS provide value for Business decision making through two mechanisms: •
GBDS provide a way to analyze internal or external marketing intelligence data in a format particularly suited to marketing decision making; and
•
GBDS provide the ability to integrate both internal and external marketing intelligence data to greatly improve the effectiveness of these marketing decisions.
B. GIS’s Capabilities in the GBDS 1) GIS maps and attribute information Unlike paper maps, GIS are capable of storing, manipulating, and displaying a much richer set of attribute information.GIS are specialized database management systems that link sets of features and their attributes and store them together in units called themes. One theme contains a set of similar features, such as all of the roads in the area of interest. A different theme might contain all of the shopping centers, along with the attributes for those features. A city map, for example, may contain many themes including interstate highways, surface streets, political boundaries, public buildings, schools, parks, etc. 2) Displaying spatial locations using GIS All the themes for a geographic area taken together make up a GIS database and one of the most obvious capabilities of GIS software is the ability to visually display the locations of geographic objects on the computer’s monitor and to print these displays. A collection of themes viewed together forms a map and each theme is a layer in this map. Further, the computer is capable of displaying multiple layers simultaneously with the locations of features in the various layers being precisely displayed relative to each other based on their locations [11]. 3) Determining spatial proximity A second powerful capability of GIS software is the ability to compare the locations of two objects (in the same or different themes) and determine if a) the two objects intersect in any way (e.g., a sales territory contains any part of a city boundary or vice-versa), b) one object completely contains or is completely contained by the other (e.g.,a prospective customer address falls within a particular sales territory),or c) one object is within a specified distance of the other (e.g., find all customer addresses within 10miles of a prospective franchise office location). Further, GIS can find the closest object in a theme to another specified location. For example, if a customer address
location is specified, the system can easily find the closest ATM machine, service center, or branch office. Finally, GIS are able to perform powerful database operations such as aggregations and joins [12]. 4) Geocoding Recall that GIS data consists of both spatial locations (expressed in some coordinate system) and attribute data. Unfortunately, specifying the geographic coordinates of objects of interest (customers, sales territories, delivery routes, etc.) can be both time consuming and expensive. Fortunately, most professional GIS software provides automated support for assigning coordinates to a special but very common type of attribute information. Geocoding is the process that converts a regular street address to a latitude–longitude (x, y) coordinate used by the GIS. Once a latitude–longitude coordinate has been assigned, the address is then georeferenced and can be displayed on a map or used in a spatial search. The importance of geocoding cannot be overstated. Since the vast majority of business data contain address information geocoding makes this information amenable to spatial analysis at very low cost. We will shortly see what kind of analysis is available [13]. C. Key Techniques of the GBDS 1) Distributed multi-dimensional time and space Database The majority of medium and large domestic enterprises and institutions have established relatively perfect basic information systems like the Custom Relationship Management (CRM), ERP and the Office Automation (OA). The common trait of these systems is that the final step to add, modify or delete the database is through the business staffs or the customers. The above systems in total can be called the Online Transaction Process (OLTP). However, the number of the databases dispersing in all enterprises and institutions is large. There is no possibility to establish a database covering the entire commercial field. Thus, this paper targets at building a code-based GIS multi-dimensional database, which mainly uses the network to link the multi-dimensional data like the time dimension or space dimension data existing in every enterprise and institution through the uniform codes, then to embed these codes and interfaces into the analysis platform in the analysis center, and transfer distributed business data dynamically. The concept of the multi-dimensional data is not complex. For example, if we want to state that the sales number of the coke in the northern area in April 2003 is 100,000 Yuan, it will be related to several aspects: time, product and area. These are called dimensions. As for the sales number, it is called metric. Of course, there are also costs, profits and so on. Besides time, product and area, we can have more dimensions like the gender and occupation of the customer, the sales department and the promotion ways. Thus, how to rationally distribute the dimensions of the data existing everywhere is to establish the procedure of data classification, which is good for further application at the level of business transaction.
The distributed multi-dimensional database is just to integrate the data with different dimensions into one spatial database. We call it the Multi-Dimensional Time and Space Database, whose core is the GIS spatial database using for the spatial analysis. 2) Component-based integration system The large volume of temporal and spatial data existing in the time and space database in the analysis center is just one obscure book for business staffs. What these business staffs need is information that is abstracted information which could be understood and benefited. At this moment, how to transform the data into information and make business staffs (including managers) able to fully master and make use of the information to assist decision making is the major problem that a component-based integration system should cope with. Embedding the commercial intelligent components into the existing enterprises’ and institutions’ application systems such as financial, human resources and sales systems makes the widespread business decision making own the property of business intelligence. It is not easy to consider one component of the decision system instead of the whole decision system. For example, applying the component-based technique into one application system, it is indispensable for a relatively complete integration system development process including analyzing the enterprise’s problems, designing plans, developing the raw system and the system application. 3) Business intelligent analysis system Owing to fierce market competition, decision makers usually propose many insightful ideas for adjusting the business operation strategy timely, which often need some data to testify the ideas. According to a common procedure, the high level officials put forward data requirements. Each department prepares the corresponding data and then combined them. Finally, the integrated data is finished. This often takes a large number of humans, materials and time. Meanwhile, sometimes as a result of a changed situation, the original requirements are also changed. Thus, due to decision making information lack and less efficient to gain information, the company often loses the opportunities to develop. Therefore, in the case of that situation, we must develop a business intelligent analysis function, which make decision makers could get the acquired data in the fastest rate when they need to testify the decisions and make an effective decision. The business intelligent analysis system is a process to collect, manage and analyze the commercial information, whose goal is to raise all levels’ decision makers’ ability to obtain knowledge and intuitions and thus to promote them make best decisions for the company. We establish the business analysis system composed by the DW, the DM as well as Analysis & Processing. The specific realization deals with the software, hardware, consulting service and applications. Its basic framework includes three parts: the DW, DM and Analysis & Processing (See Fig. 2) 4) Visualized spatial analysis module The spatial analysis is a data analysis technique for the commercial distribution based on position objects. The eminent advantage of the system this paper focuses is to make use of
the spatial information analysis technique to extract the data containing the position information in the multi-dimensional database and load the data to the system analysis module, carrying out observation and experimentation of the data model. The business customers could gain new experience and knowledge about the spatial commercial behaviors and take them as the evidence for decision making of the commercial behaviors. 5) Business investments and prediction module Because business operation often has great risks, the function of evaluating and predicting the business investment risk plays a vital role for the commercial enterprises [1]. Buying, selling and stocking the goods all need detailed analyses. Buying the products, deciding the sales price and the proper stock are all the problems that a businessman must take into serious consideration. According to the specific situation and operation target of the businessman, choosing a proper investment portfolio is a key factor for the commercial operation success. Evaluating the performance of a proper investment portfolio needs both the analysis of the whole investment portfolio and the analysis of the interior of the portfolio. We could judge whether the former investment portfolios make profit based on the global analysis, while the interior analysis of the investment portfolios could imply the fields which the investment portfolios make profit or lose. Aiming at meeting the business requirement, the relative module after secondary development, based on the decision system, loads the system client-sides, and is able to satisfy the demand of the business prediction and investment analysis on a certain level.
needed information. This information and analysis support can come from the GDBS components in the OLAP box, which is the results of information developing, by Date management, Date Mining, GIS analysis and Business Intelligence. The date of Developing Information comes from the Distributed MultiDimensional Time and Space Database. . Distributed Multi-Dimensional Time and Space Database
IS-based Business Decision System DSS GIS analysis
Business Intelligence
Date Mining
Date Management
OLAP III.
RESULTS
Above sections have presented some of the basic capabilities of GIS software and the key techniques of the GBDS .While, these capabilities and techniques are especially important as determinants of the business use and value of GIS.
Assessing information
Distributing information
In this section we will design the system and implement it. A. Designing of the System The next section integrates these capabilities and techniques with the four elements of marketing information systems presented in Fig1. We use The GBDS conceptual model as a framework to show how GIS technology can be used in Business Decision Making System. The conceptual model of GIS-based Business Decision System that show relationships between managerial tasks, uses of the MIS, GIS analysis, Business Intelligence, Date Mining, and decisions in the marketing environment. The model shows that a GBDS has several distinct components and that these components have a number of interrelationships. A manager performing one of the tasks in the bottom box pertaining to one (or more) of the decisions in the marketing environment must identify information needs and obtain the
Marketing Managers Analysis/ Planning Implementing / Controlling Investigating
Figure 1. The model for gis-based business decision system. The general framework of the GBDS comprises of four parts: the Source System (SS), the DW, the Multi-dimensional Database (MDD) and the Client-Sides (CS) presented in Fig.2. 1) The source system
The SS includes all existing enterprises’ OLTP. Establishing a new distributed system does not need to change the existing system. 2) The date warehouse The DW is a theme-oriented, integrated, steady and different temporal data collection, which is used to support the decision making process of operation management. The data, distributed in the company’s each traditional database, is cleaned, extracted and transferred into other classifications. The DW extracts the data from the SS continuously, possibly once a day or three hours, and then memorizes the data in a neutral memory block. The DW is still built on the relational database, which often meets the model called “Star Structure”. 3) The multi-dimensional database The data from the data warehouse forms the cubic structure after classification treatment and multi-dimension model building. Each cube describes a theme like sales, stock or finance. 4) The visual client-sides The client software can be show to the user with information of variety, after multi-dimensional date visualization.
The Source System
The Date Warehouse The Multi-dimensional Database
The Client-Sides Figure 2. The general framework of the gbds. B. Realization of the System Judging from the micro level, the general performance of the profit enterprises behavior, always focus on lower costs and increase revenues. Internal activities to reduce costs, such as supply chain management is to optimize the allocation of resources, reduce transportation costs, GIS application in this area has more
depth, especially in the logistics industry, GIS applications have matured. Enterprises are mainly in the external activities to increase income, investment to expand production and marketing is to increase sales, the two aspects are most important for all enterprises to increase revenue of both. Therefore, this study aimed at activities outside the firm's investment and marketing, research and location of the decision-making process of analysis combined with the spatial decision-making system, the improved business model, construction and business investment marketing decision support system. According to the typical business practices, the study consists of two aspects: 1) The investment decision support system Investment decision support system is the plug-independent system, under the investment behavior of business enterprises, combined with GIS in spatial analysis. The aim is to help companies considering various factors, particularly the impact of spatial location information, significantly improving the effectiveness of corporate investment and high ROI. The main decision-making analysis can be divided into three aspects: the consumer analysis, the evaluation of investment environment and the selection of investment site. Since any act of investment business in the consuming products or services, the consumer analysis is the basis for investment analysis. The assessment of spending power, and identify of potential consumer groups, the decision-making system when the excavation is especially concerned about two aspects. On this basis, the evaluation of investment environment and investment costs in order to further analyze and determine the scale of investment required. according to the above, and combined with existing in the social impact of factor analysis, The Decision-making system application of the most senior decision-making investment is location, using of GIS spatial analysis function and making a comprehensive business intelligence investment site selection. 2) The marketing decision support system Marketing always takes into account the factors that place the consumer engage in various decision-making. According to different levels of consumer aggregation to determine the target market and change sell network at any time to adjust. At the same time, it is essential to take into account the competitors of similar products or services where the location and sales volume, this will help improve corporate sales strategies, to avoid unnecessary losses. Therefore, the system plug-in is required to take into account enterprise business, combined with the traditional enterprise sales decision-making system to consider the problem of decision-making for the sale of the development of proprietary systems. IV.
DISCUSSION
All selling organizations are challenged by the problem of directing marketing efforts to the audience that has the highest
potential to respond to those efforts and make purchases. One of the most widely used capabilities of GIS in marketing is the ability to perform market analysis to identify the best customers, their places of residence, and concentrations of potential customers with similar characteristics. The MultiDimensional Time and Space Database can help with this task. Data warehousing is the process of combining internal and external data and reformatting the data to make it easily accessible to decision makers. Data in the DW is not linked to the organization’s production databases and users generally cannot make changes to the data (though they can often copy it to their personal computers and manipulate it there). Reformatting may include storing summarized data (e.g., sales by product by month or sales by region by month) in addition to raw data. Data may also be stored in a format that makes sense to the expected users rather than in the fragmented formats that support operational efficiency in a transactionoriented database.
mechanism which makes the data serve every person who wants it. Through the analysis of operation data, markets, suppliers, customers, it will optimize business operating decisions and improve the enterprise’s market competitiveness REFERENCES [1]
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[4]
Date play important roles in the operation of GBDS, and therefore, the important parts of realization of the system are data mining and analysis & processing. The process of data mining actually is to extract business knowledge from the data in the multi-dimensional database. The knowledge is implicit, undiscovered, and potentially useful information. The extracted knowledge is expressed in the form of concepts, rules, laws and modes. Realizing the system is to transform the data of highcapacity preliminarily processed in the DW into useful knowledge and decision information, providing effective support for decision makers.
[5]
The analysis & processing is an integration of some techniques by which decision makers could rapidly gain the information they need. It could help decision makers to observe the information on every aspect to achieve the goal of deeply understanding the data through rapid, consistent and interchangeable visiting the data in each possible data warehouse. The analysis & processing is an information analysis and processing procedure based on the DW, which slicing, chopping, drilling and rotating the multi-dimensional data in the DW, extracting the relative data in different angles, and deeply analyzing and processing the data.
[10]
V.
CONCLUSION
The GIS-based Business Decision System is to combine the techniques of the GIS, the Artificial Intelligence, the DSS, the DM and the Web with the traditional database management system. The decision makers of the commercial enterprises could use it to easily visit the rich data, query, report forms and conducting the analysis. Also, it introduces a distributed component-based platform and provides an optional cheap
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