Development of a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for Route Costing Calculations within the Irish Timber Haulage Sector

Since the 1970s, decision support systems (DSS) have become popular as computer technology has developed. A DSS aims to support the solving of specific problems with both human and computer techniques. The purpose of this research was to design and develop a DSS for application to cost and revenue calculations of contracted timber haulage in Ireland. The DSS allows the costs and revenue of timber haulage to be calculated on a daily basis and on a route-specific basis. This implies that the user interface allows certain criteria to be selected, such as truck configuration, truck model, engine size, horsepower, and design gross vehicle weight. Both the revenue and running costs are directly related to the payload weight and the distance traveled. To generate the routes traveled and provide a sophisticated interface for spatial road map information, a Geographic Information System (GIS) was used; ESRI's ArcView 8.3 provides its own application programming in the form of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).