Integrating simulation and business intelligence analyses for tactical and strategic decisions in transportation systems

Abstract

Transportation planners, analysts and decision-makers usually make use of simulation tools in order to accurately predict the performance of new practices and policies before their implementation. Additionally, most of them, recently introduced new auxiliary Business Intelligence decision support tools in order to transform their available huge amount of real operating data into timely and accurate information for their decisions. Although both of those types of automated decision support are valuable, very few attempts were already made by researchers to integrate them into a unified tool. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for a decision support system that integrates both of these technologies, simulation and Business Intelligence, in order to enhance the overall practical interest for its usage by taking advantage of the foreseen synergy of the integration. The paper discusses the potential interest of the proposed integration, and identifies a set of questions that can then be answered with effectiveness and more efficiently than before.