Plant Services - July 2008 - (Page 50)

WEB HUNTER Another application Come the fall, football season will be in full bloom, along with adjunct activities such as office pools and fantasy football leagues. Needless to say, if you’re going to put real cash into these ventures, you might want to consider the idea of using a DSS to slew the odds a bit more in your favor. One such single-purpose DSS is available, amazingly enough, on the Internet. Brandie Searle and Greg Alan developed the software and Automation Creations Inc., out of Blacksburg, Va., distributes it online. Although the software is free, you’ll need to subscribe if you want periodic data updates. I’d imagine that those who are sufficiently rabid about football will probably be able to wing it without the updates. That’s a personal choice you can make when you do an end run to www.pcdrafter.com to start betting smarter. morphs into a cube, which a spreadsheet could still conceivably handle. If you have four or more variables, you’re into hyperspace and analysis in that realm is going to require another approach. This is a good time to introduce the idea of OLAP, an acronym for online analytical processing, the software that proves useful for any multidimensional set of DSS data. There are several sources for OLAP software. In a completely capricious, arbitrary, random selection, I present for your consideration the www.filedudes.com. Pay them a visit and enter the term OLAP in the search box. Then, scroll down for an entry called OLAP + CHART MODELKIT 3.6 by Perpetuum Software. At that point, you can access a free download as long as you’re satisfied with a trial version. A good collection Organically grown The financial markets in this country are said to be efficient. That means arbitrage, or buying a negotiable instrument at a low price in one market and selling at a high price in another, is nearly impossible, instant communication being what it is. Everything relevant that’s known about the stock or bond or whatever is already reflected in the price. Besides, there are thousands of people working on calculations and theories designed to beat the market. They’re all nibbling at the edges, never getting a big bite, and market prices reflect the truth about value. The collective action of so many players, a prediction market, constitutes a decision support system that indicates how much one should pay for a particular investment. But that’s not the only use for a prediction market. They’ve been applied to the Fed’s monetary policy, economic indicators, stock prices and more. They’re a sort of futures market that uses real money and has real payoffs; anyone can play, but it’s a winner-take-all game. If you’re interested in the power of prediction markets as a viable DSS, you should read “Prediction Markets as Decision Support Systems,” by Joyce E. Berg and Thomas A. Rietz at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. This 15-page paper, available at www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/archive/decisionsupport.pdf, provides background for the prediction market they established for the 2008 presidential election. You can learn more about it at www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem. Political junkies can now put their money where their mouths are. Decision Support Systems Resources is an evolving Web site that’s intended to be a repository of cutting-edge information about the topic. Launched during the summer of 1995 by Daniel J. Power, a professor of Information Systems and Management at the College of Business Administration at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, the site has some good features. The important links are on the left side of the screen. For example, the folks engaged in designing and using decision support systems have, as you would expect, developed a certain jargon to better communicate their ideas. The “DSS glossary” link can have you speaking fluent DSS quickly. If you need to do a literature search to enhance your argumentative credibility vis-à-vis management, the “Articles” link gives you access to many free documents gathered from a variety of sources. One “channel” is direct- A DSS is almost mandatory if one is to make sense of the gigabytes of CMMS data. ed at managers. A mere mouse click gives you a DSS FAQ and a selection of case studies. The other options require registration and cash. So, go to http://dssresources.com, but tread lightly.Generic multi-attribute analysis (GMAA) is a type of DSS that tolerates incomplete input data. Lacking sufficient space to explain it in any more detail, I’ll refer you to www.dia.fi.upm.es/~ajimenez/GMAA, where you can learn more than you really want to know about the procedure. But, if what you read suggests an application in your plant, professors Sixto Ríos Insua, Alfonso Mateos Caballero and Antonio Jiménez Martín from El Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial de la Universidad Politécnica de July 2008 Hyperspatial data Sometimes the data that fill a DSS can only be represented by a series of complicated, interdependent tables. If you have only one or two relevant variables, you could use a flat spreadsheet. With three variables, your spreadsheet 50 www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.filedudes.com http://www.pcdrafter.com http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/archive/decisionsupport.pdf http://dssresources.com http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/archive/decisionsupport.pdf http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem http://www.dia.fi.upm.es/~ajimenez/GMAA http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

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Plant Services - July 2008 Contents From the Editor Letters The PS Files Up and Running Crisis Corner Asset Manager Technology Toolbox Cover Story Compressors Power Transmission Flooring Web Hunter In the Trenches Product Picks Classifieds Energy Expert

Plant Services - July 2008

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