Cooperative Decision Support Systems

Abstract

The subject of our research aims to support in the most suitable way the collaborative decision-making process. Several scientific approaches deal with collaborative decision-making: decision analysis (Carlsson & Turban, 2002; Doyle & Thomason, 1999; Keeney & Raiffa, 1976) developing different analytical tools for optimal decision-making; in management sciences the observation of decision-making styles activity (Nuut, 2005; Fong, Wyer, & Robert 2003); decision-making as a group work (Esser, 1998; Matta & Corby, 1997); studies concerning different types of decisions focalised on number of actors: individual (Keeney & Raiffa, 1976), group (Shim, Warkentin, Courtney, Power, Sharda, & Carlsson, 2002), cooperative (Zaraté, 2005), and collaborative (Karacapilidis & Papadias, 2001). For the collaborative decision-making field, the situation is clear. In most of research studies, the concept of collaborative decision-making is used as a synonym for cooperative decision-making. Hence, the collaborative decision-making process is considered to be distributed and asynchronous (Chim, Anumba, & Carillo, 2004; Cil, Alpturk, & Yazgan, 2005). However, we can stand out several works, having different research approaches, considering collaborative decision-making process as multi-actor decision-making process, where actors have different goals. Considering (Panzarasa, Jennings, & Norman, 2002) the collaborative decision-making process is seen as “a group of logically decentralised agents that cooperate to achieve objectives that are typically beyond the capacities of an individual agent. In short, the collaborative decision-making has generally been viewed and modelled as a kind of distributed reasoning and search, whereby a collection of agents collaboratively go throughout the search space of the problem in order to find a solution.” The main interrogation of this article is to study the best way to support collaborative decision-making process.