Modelling and Simulation of a Decision Support System Prototype Built on an Improved Data Warehousing Architecture for the School of Postgraduate, MAUTECH, Yola – Nigeria

Abstract

A Data Warehouse (DW) is constructed with the goal of storing and providing all the relevant information that is generated along the heterogeneous databases of an organization. The development and management of precise and up-to-date information concerning academic staff, department, faculty, student’s academic record etc. is critically important in the management of a university. This study has become necessary because, data warehousing is a new field, a small number of investigations has been done regarding the features of academic data analysis and report. At present, data warehousing is among the best solution for gathering and maintaining data for decision making.  Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop a DW prototype model for the School of Postgraduate Studies’ (SPGS) programmes of Modibbo Adama University of Technology (MAUTEC), Yola. The objective of the study is to model and simulate a decision support system that is capable of querying the prototype DW database model to generate reports as output in order to help administrative decision making of the SPGS MAUTEC, Yola. The study has provided relevant literatures in relation to the subject matter. In the methodology, a secondary, field and case study research were conducted. The software engineering development methodology considered was the “Realistic Waterfall Model”. The findings of this paper provide a DW prototype database model using a dimensional modeling technique and the graphic user interface tool for reports and analysis. The researchers have demonstrated their understanding on the subject matter and as a matter of fact, possible future work has been suggested from where we stopped.

Keywords - Data Warehouse, Modeling, Simulation, Prototype and Decision Support System