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About Quantitative Decision Support®
Quantitative Decision Support® provides software and services that enable decision makers to manage uncertainty. The company specializes in analyzing situations in which complex dependency relationships incur risk. Its mission is to identify and analyze exposure to risk to ensure that robust plans and informed decisions can be made at the appropriate time.
Dr. Philip O’Neill, President of Quantitative Decision Support®, originally worked for the Department of National Defence in Canada, where he helped create an application to prepare for the “Y2K bug”. The application mapped all potential pathways of failure by using a network of dependency relationships. After completing the project, he started his own company, to create a vastly improved and more powerful version of the initial application.
Quantitative Decision Support's RiskOutLook®
The improved application, called RiskOutLook®, features an entirely new user interface with new
algorithms. It performs strategic risk analysis in a multitude of areas where risk is involved, including identifying
infrastructure dependencies and managing project portfolios. RiskOutLook® performs these analyses by identifying areas of concern, such as entities that impose the most potential impact and relationships that change over time.
On a more technical level, RiskOutLook® is a data-driven application that generates and browses graphs. Custom controls manage the data, and Tom Sawyer Visualization provides graph exploration capabilities that identify areas of risk. RiskOutLook® is made up of two main components, “Network Panorama®” and "PRIM Chart®" that appear in the user interface as panels. Users implement custom controls in the Network Panorama® to create model representations of data. The "PRIM Chart®" then uses Tom Sawyer Visualization to layout representations of the model, or representation subsets, in a drawing. Users can view the "PRIM Chart®" to visually identify the relationships among entities.
Quantitative Decision Support's Challenge
Earlier versions of Quantitative Decision Support’s application lacked graph visualization capabilities. Instead, the connections and summaries of risks were shown as charts and tables in Microsoft Excel. Users found it extremely difficult to identify all of the associations without a diagram display of the relationships and critical dependencies. Moreover, Quantitative Decision Support® was unable to satisfy the end-user demand to visualize their data. Consequently, Dr. O’Neill began researching pre-built visualization applications that Quantitative Decision Support® could integrate into RiskOutLook® without having to create a visualization system of their own. |
Choosing Tom Sawyer
Quantitative Decision Support® carried out an intensive search online and identified Tom Sawyer Software as the leader in high performance graph visualization, layout, and analysis
systems. Tom Sawyer Visualization was able to provide the two main capabilities that Quantitative Decision Support® was looking for: the ability to automatically generate organized and visually pleasing layouts, and the ability to use Excel data to automatically draw graphs.
According to Dr. O’Neill, "Tom Sawyer Visualization fulfilled all of the requirements for my application. It was clear that I had found exactly what I was looking for. Since I began this project ten years ago, I have not found competitors in the visualization field that could be used as effectively by RiskOutLook®. None are as powerful as Tom Sawyer Visualization."
The Tom Sawyer Solution
Tom Sawyer Visualization is a fully customizable and extensible set of class libraries with APIs for developing graph visualization applications quickly and efficiently. The incorporation of Tom Sawyer Visualization, Java Edition enables RiskOutLook® to automatically layout complex graphs quickly and easily. RiskOutLook® contains Tom Sawyer Visualization, Version 9.0 and Quantitative Decision Support® continues to ensure that they stay up-to-date with the latest versions.
Dr. O’Neill stated, "Familiarizing ourselves with the many features of Tom Sawyer Visualization has been a long, but rewarding process. The combination of the development guide, API specification, and example applications have regularly answered what we needed to know."
The Tom Sawyer Impact
Tom Sawyer Visualization enables RiskOutLook® to graphically depict potential chains of impact. Users can now use RiskOutLook® to better foresee potential risks and make plans to mitigate the impact of emergencies.
According to Dr. O’Neill, "Without the ability to see the graphs, it is impossible to understand the risk model. Tom Sawyer Software gives us the eyes that we need to understand the relationships between entities and to analyze all possible pathways of risk exposure."
Overview
- Manage and display data captured in a structured way from subject matter experts
- Identify and depict all potential chains of impact that are implied by direct dependency relationships
- Make exhaustive predictions of potential outcomes for consideration by the experts
- Model entities and relationships that change over time
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