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.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Revisited Cognitive Decision-Making Process: Is composed by four steps: intelligence, design, choice, and review and the two forts steps are visited very often, the decision makers must sort out the information in a very efficient way.
Collective Decision-Making Process: Collective decision making process is defined as a decision making process in which several decision makers are involved that could happen in three kinds of situations: face to face, distributed synchronous, and distributed asynchronous situations.
Cooperative Decision Support Systems: Is seen as a framework in which several packages are necessary for supporting in an efficient way, decision makers involved in cooperative decision making process. This framework is composed by: an interpersonal communication management system, a task management system, a knowledge management tool, and a dynamical man/machine interactions management tool.