Thesis (Ph.D.)(Informatics)--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 262-273).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Colorado State University, 1991. / Includes decision support system programs (App. B). Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]-144). Also available in print version.

Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Limburg, Maastricht. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

This thesis presents the development and evaluation of a computerized physician-parent decision support tool for a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), known as Physician and Parent Decision Support (PPADS). The NICU is a specialized hospital unit that treats very-ill neonates. Many difficult care decisions are made daily for this vulnerable population. The PPADS tool aims to augment current NICU decision-making by helping parents and physicians make more informed decisions, improving physician-parent communication, increasing parent decision-making satisfaction, decreasing conflict, and increasing decision efficiency. The development of the PPADS tool followed a five-step methodology: assessing the clinical environment, establishing the design criteria, developing the system design, implementing the system, and performing usability testing. Usability testing of the PPADS tool was performed on neonatologists and on parents of neonates who have graduated (survived) from a tertiary level NICU. The usability testing demonstrated the usefulness and ease of use of the tool.

This thesis presents the development and evaluation of a computerized physician-parent decision support tool for a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), known as Physician and Parent Decision Support (PPADS). The NICU is a specialized hospital unit that treats very-ill neonates. Many difficult care decisions are made daily for this vulnerable population. The PPADS tool aims to augment current NICU decision-making by helping parents and physicians make more informed decisions, improving physician-parent communication, increasing parent decision-making satisfaction, decreasing conflict, and increasing decision efficiency. The development of the PPADS tool followed a five-step methodology: assessing the clinical environment, establishing the design criteria, developing the system design, implementing the system, and performing usability testing. Usability testing of the PPADS tool was performed on neonatologists and on parents of neonates who have graduated (survived) from a tertiary level NICU. The usability testing demonstrated the usefulness and ease of use of the tool.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

In the automotive industry, assembly lines are used to produce vehicles. These assembly lines improve throughput, and need to be carefully planned. Planning, or balancing, an assembly line constitutes identifying precedence relationships between tasks in the assembly line, and assigning tasks to stations to fit some criteria. This procedure is costly to do by hand, and is well-suited for some level of automation. The problem of balancing assembly lines has been researched since the 1950’s, but modern assembly lines largely rely on engineers to balance the line by hand. This thesis proposes that the work flow of engineers planning the assembly line would be improved by a group decision support system. This group decision support system could supply engineers with proposals for assembly lines, which the engineers can choose to modify further, either by hand or with the decision support system. The group decision support system is realized with a distributed system, consisting of a front-end, a back-end, an application programming interface to balance assembly lines, and two databases. The front-end is a website, where the users can create problems with a precedence graph. The back-end allows data to be permanently stored in the two databases, and allows communication with the application programming interface. The contribution of this thesis is a proof of concept of a group decision support system that can solve two basic types of assembly line balancing problems, SALBP-1 and SALBP-2. During development it was found that the developed system was generic enough to support different types of tasks, such as planning cooking. Further development is needed to use the system in an industrial setting, as real assembly lines need more complex models than the current version support.

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