Itt Trip Scheduling

ITT Trip Scheduling

The Information, Tours and Tickets (ITT) office could use a system to assist

them in creating trip schedules. In this paper I will outline a plan for a

Decision Support System (DSS) that will assist ITT in creating schedules for

their tours. This system will also track customer surveys and hold data about

all of ITTs trips. They already have some computer systems, a spread sheet

program and a data base management system (DBMS) which can all be used to build

a small DSS. Using the DBMS and the spread sheet software I have designed a

system to assist them in making decisions about scheduling trips. This system

also allows them access to information about all of ITTs trips and the feedback

from customers about each trip. In the next few paragraphs I go through the

major steps in developing a system of this nature. A system of this type goes

through several phases in its development. I start with the planning phase and

go on to discuss research, analysis and conceptual design. Then I talk a little

about the models used in this system. I finish by talking about the actual

design, the construction, and the implementation of the new ITT system. I

finish the paper with a discussion of maintaining the system.

The first step in building any DSS is planning. Planning is basically defining

the problem. The planning also involves an assessment of exactly what is needed.

In this case I deal with trip scheduling. In the case description this would

include: How many trips to offer, the days of the week to have particular trips,

and when to cancel trips. Obviously the scheduling ties to other information

such as profit and participation, but for this paper I will only cover the

scheduling portion of ITTs problem. Therefore I have defined the problem as a

basic scheduling problem. I see a need for ITT to better schedule trips using

the information they have and using the information they collect from customer

surveys. With the problem defined we can now look at what information is needed

to further analyze the problem.

After a problem is defined, information must be collected. The research phase

of system development is just that, collecting information. The information

collected will be used in the next phase of development to further analyze the

problem and it will be used in this case to build the databases. The databases