The development and empirical study of a knowledge-based site-selection group decision support system

The objectives of this research are to develop a knowledge-based group decision support system for site selection and to explore the effectiveness of the system. The GDSS uses an enhanced Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to identify a small subset of candidate locations from the location database. A knowledge-based system (KBS) was created to check the degree of group consensus, which is determined by some fuzzy scalar measures. The output from the KBS shows the performance of group commitment on the weighting of location factors. The decision makers are then requested for further evaluating the candidate locations via computer-mediated group discussion. To evaluate the performance of the KBS in the GDSS, an empirical study was designed and implemented. The results show that GDSS supported groups using both TOPSIS and KBS enhancements had better outcomes than GDSS supported groups using only TOPSIS enhancement