UTP Research Recognition Award System: with Decision Support processing

Based on the main title, the focus of this Final Year Project is on the development of
a web-based decision support system. The specific users for this application are the
staffs in Research Enterprise Office (REO) of University Technology of Petronas
(UTP) and also all the researchers that involve in the research activities. This
Decision Support System (DSS) main objective is to help the users in selecting the
most suitable candidates to receive several awards available during the 'Employee
Recognition & Award' event. Other than that, this project also has the objectives to
provide a centralized database system to store all information regarding the research
works available in UTP and also to eliminate the paper-based forms usage in order to
ensure data consistency and integrity. All those objectives are meant to overcome all
the problems that are currently facing by the REO staffs. Among the problems are;
the time consuming process to manually review all profiles of all researchers
available in UTP, the loss of data consistency, and also the inefficient way to make a
decision within a department. The scope of study for this project is initially started by
identifying the basic underlying concept to develop a DSS and its relation with a webbased
system. It's also covered the issue of developing a centralized database system
and also the implementation of production rules by using PHP scripting. The
methodology that has been followed for the development process of this project is
based on the findings from the journal. It includes several activities such as research,
conceptualization, discussion, brainstorming, interview, observation, design, and also
testing. This DSS will be a Web-based system in order to ensure its availability to the
target users. However, to ensure data confidentiality, it will be published only in the
UTP Intranet. It consist all main components of a DSS; a database, a search
(inference) engine, production rules, weightage allocation and also user-interface.