A Decision Support System for Municipal Budget Plan Decisions

Abstract

This paper describes a Decision Support System to provide indicators to support budget plan decisions, in a local government organization, the municipality of Lagoa - S. Miguel, Azores. The work includes system modeling, using the UML notation, the development of a MySQL relational database, algorithms for data collection using PHP, and forecasting models using R functions, such as exponential smoothing, classical decomposition with linear trend, and ARIMA models. Users have access to predictions made by different models for several indicators, being suggested to use the models with closest to zero errors. From the analysis performed considering 12 years data, it is concluded that for most of indicators, the classical decomposition model is the most successful. However, for some indicators, it was found that the two error measures used are not consistent. In these cases, the final decision is left to the decision-maker, taking advantage of his domain knowledge.