An integrated intelligent decision support system based on sensor and computer networks

Wireless sensor networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in many military, civil, agricultural, and industrial applications ranging from mission- critical homeland security defense, battlefield assessment, health care improvement, environment surveillance, climate research, disaster recovery, ecological forestry and wildlife monitoring, to manufacturing process control. The large amount of data produced in sensor networks combined with complex mathematical models in various applications is far beyond the processing and computing capabilities of a sensor node, or even a high-end PC workstation, and therefore must be transmitted to computer networks such as the Internet for distributed processing where abundant system resources such as computing power, storage space, and network bandwidth are widely deployed. In this chapter, we present a general framework of IDSS-SC, an intelligent decision support system that integrates both sensing and computing subsystems.