ABSTRACT: The paper presents a self-evolving approach to decision support systems (DSS) design. The basic premise of this approach is that a DSS should be aware of how it is being used and, then, automatically adapt to the evolution of its users. With self-evolving capabilities, a DSS will be able to provide a flexible menu hierarchy and a dynamic user interface. The major difference between the self-evolving design and a DSS developed by current approaches such as system development life cycle and user-involved evolutionary design is that the former has an extra component—the evolutionary mechanism—to control the evolution of the system. In order to develop self-evolving capabilities, the following three components must be developed: (1) a database of user profiles to keep track of related system usage data, (2) a knowledge base to store rules for determining appropriate system default policy, and (3) a control mechanism to control the evolution of the system.
Key words and phrases: self-evolving design, decision support systems, information systems development