Economic pressures and global competition are forcing US manufacturers and government to make decisions as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Such decision problems include locating facilities, transporting manpower and materials , battle strategy analysis, globally coordinating manufacturing, and molecular design. Advanced Process Combinatorics proposes commercialization of the distributed decision support system DOMINION, which will make decisions using rigorous optimization principles rather than rule-based or other heuristic approaches currently in practice, allowing for the most cost effective decisions possible. Furthermore, although large decision problems currently require expensive supercomputers to exploit rigorous optimization technology, DOMINION will be developed for much lower cost platforms (desktop workstations) in large number. This will allow organizations without larger scale computers to utilize their currently installed workstations and networks instead. It further removes the single point of failure fault from large, time critical computations. DOMINION will operate by distributing a parallelizable optimization problem across a heterogeneous, globally distributed network of workstations. Each computational agent in the distribution is fully capable of solving portions of the overall problem and dispatching portions of its work to and receiving from other networked agents. This model, in contrast to the currently popular master-slave models, is easily scalable to very large networks, and is significantly more robust to partial network failure. Sales of decision support software easily range in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. DOMINION will augment the current commerical offerings with new capabilities, and allow optimization of larger decision problems at a much lower cost.
