An Intelligent Decision Support System For A Knowledge City'S Strategy Formulation

The past several years, there have been intensive discussions about the importance of knowledge management in our society. Nowadays, it is commonly accepted that many knowledge management disciplines and practices are relevant to the social-level knowledge based development. In this context, the theme of Knowledge Cities (KCs) came to the front as a very important topic of discussion among researchers and practitioners. The concept of KCs is particularly advantageous for any contemporary urban region. Many cities globally are considered successful KCs, while other cities have elaborated strategic plans in order to integrate this concept into their operational structures. However, in most cases, the process of formulating knowledge-based strategies was not appropriately supported by integrated and coherent decision-support methodologies. The authors have already proposed a methodological approach (KnowCis) for the integrated development of a KC, consisting of five main phases and taking into account nine different dimensions. This paper is focused to the first two phases, i.e. the formulation of KC's strategy. This procedure is complicated enough for any authority (e.g local government or city's development agency) charged with this task. Consequently, the main aim of this paper is to present an intelligent decision support system for the formulation of the basic principles of a KC's strategic plan. This system consists of two subsystems: the first one evaluates the necessity for a particular action or intervention (among the ones integrated to the KnowCis methodology) and proposes its most appropriate form it was developed using the technology of expert systems. The second one classifies the selected actions, based on user pre-defined criteria and thresholds it was developed using a multi-criteria approach. The system has already provided successful results, in the framework of the KnowCis pilot application to a Greek municipality.