Visualizing Consensus in Group Decision Making Situations

In the resolution of group decision making problems the consensus process, that is, the process where experts discuss about the alternatives to narrow their differences, is usually held with all the experts gathered together in a place where they can speak and discuss about the alternatives in the problem. However, in situations where it is not possible to bring them all together it is usually difficult for the experts to identify the closeness of the opinions of the rest of the experts, and thus, it can be difficult to have a clear view of the current state of the consensus process. In this paper we present a tool that creates consensus diagrams that help experts to easily comprehend the current consensus state in the decision problem. This tool is based on several consistency, consensus and similarity measures and with the application of a clustering algorithm, it identifies and represents the different groups of experts with similar opinions, identifies a possible candidate for spokesperson for each group and easily depicts the consistency level expressed by each one of the experts.