Evolutionary approach to the development of decision support systems in the movie industry

This paper reports the development and implementation of a decision support system in a non-traditional domain — the motion picture industry. The approach reported here is evolutionary, and the model was designed to assist exhibition executives in movie scheduling. After an earlier successful collaboration in scheduling a single theater with multiple screens, we now turn to the multi-theater multi screens situation, describing the problems encountered in that situation and how we have dealt with them. Using a quasi-experimental design, the decision support system was estimated to improve the net margin by over US $ 900,000 on an annual basis. The paper describes the implementation process and the performance evaluation metrics that had been agreed upon with the management.