Co-oP: A Group Decision Support System for Cooperative Multiple Criteria Group Decision Making

This book proposes an approach to analyzing, designing and implementing Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). The experience gained in developing a concrete system, Co-oP, suggests that GDSS should be distributed, loosely-coupled and process-driven. A distributed and loosely-coupled GDSS architecture provides autonomy and flexibility for individual decision-making, and homogeneity and simplicity for group problem solving. Also, process-driven GDSS are able to deal with the unpredictable nature of group problems since collective decision processes have been shown to be the only elements in a GDSS that are (i) stable enough to fit into most collective problems, (ii) reasonably structurable to be implementable, and (iii) sufficiently controllable to guarantee appropriate use. From a Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) viewpoint, this book supports the integrated use of various MCDM methods to help a GDSS (i) support a wide range of decision situations, (ii) attenuate the difficulty of information search, (iii) allow division of decision-making tasks, and (iv) permit consensus seeking analysis. Co-oP runs on a network of individual workstations. It contains a set of MCDM methods, techniques of aggregation of preferences, and a consensus seeking algorithm to support negotiation. Electronic communication among group members is monitored by a group norm filter which is adaptable to a large number of collective decision situations. This book also reports some empirical evaluations of Co-oP and expands the proposed approach to non-cooperation and organizational decision-making.