Our business life is characterized by increasing dynamics in growing global contexts. Entreppreneurial decisions are taken faster and lead to bigger and bigger consequences. Comprehensive provision of data by information systems can help to improve the quality of operational decisions. The aggregation and analysis of automated data collection simplifies focusing on important key performance indicators. Simulation and optimization models are used to reduce the complexity of problems. A useful (partial) automation of decisions is the goal. These can be documented rationally by a consistent methodical support.
The Decision Support Group in the Institute of Business Information Systems at TU Braunschweig is concerned with models, methods and systems for the planning and control of processes. The work focuses the application domain of logistics, transportation and traffic. The research-oriented identity of the team tends the development of a trendsetting paradigm for transportation control. An international visibility of the working group is striven for in this area.
In teaching, decision models, process and information models as well as their integration into modern application systems are conveyed to the students of the combination studies at TU Braunschweig. Graduates are qualified to design and manage complex application systems in transportation and traffic.
A central research aspect is the information system in logistics, transportation and traffic. This is analyzed with regard to strategic, tactical and operative questions. Decision Support in logistics and transportation requires the modeling of the domain-specific tasks and processes as well as the support of these models by means of integrated information systems. Methods from the area of the Business Intelligence and Data Mining provide information models. These serve the derivation of optimal decisions by Operations Research. Processes of logistics and and transportation are of special interest due to their control having to react to the changing environment. Its investigation aims at models and methods which include dynamic problem structures adequately and permit an optimal control.
The Decision Support Group deals with strategic, tactical and operative tasks. Management Information Systems support unstructured activities of planning, decision, organization and control within a strategic level. The focus is on concepts of Data Warehousing, i.e. on the organization and processing of extensive amounts of data for strategic decision support. Business Intelligence provides methods that generate useful reports based on this data. The Decision Support Group offers traineeships based on IBM Cognos, the market leader software for Business Intelligence reports.
Resource Management focuses the transformation of strategic decisions in transactions within the tactical level. Operations Research refers to the usage of information resulting from Enterprise Resource Planning in terms of optimization methods for the support of the tactical decisions. Application centred deepenings are offered in teaching (e.g. SAP ERP courses).
Optimized resources are conceived and analyzed by means of efficient business processes in the context of workflow management within the operative level. Online Transactional Processing allows for real time control and analysis of transactions, which are modeled by means of Business Process Modelling. We refer to event-driven process chains in our introductionary courses.