Design and implementation of a decision support system to aid in the forecasting and scheduling of Administrative Sciences courses

Abstract

The Administrative Sciences Department's faculty and course scheduling process is complex and data intensive. The process is driven by student enrollment forecasts provided to the department by the Naval Postgraduate School's Program Administration Assistant. The department currently has no means for manipulating the forecasts. This thesis develops a decision support system and its associated dBASE IV-based relational database for use by the Administrative Sciences Department in the forecasting and scheduling processes. The system consists of four major applications comprised of over 65 separate modules. The database management application allows for management and maintenance of the database files. The scheduling application generates teaching schedules. The report generating application produces all the reports required of the system by the department. Finally, the estimation application provides the decision support portion of the system by allowing "what-if" manipulation of the student enrollment data to see what impact there will be on teaching requirements. The system was developed within a Systems Development Life Cycle framework. Due to the need to quickly produce a working copy of the system, individual modules were developed using a Version Development technique.