Enhancing the group decision making process: an intelligent systems architecture

The authors present a preliminary specification for intelligent systems which can improve communication, actively guide the nature of the information-exchange process, and reduce the uncertainty that is typical in group-decision problems. They show that the overall design objective must be to provide a support mechanism sensitive to the context of group decision-making. In meeting this objective, an intelligent group decision support system should, when stimulating discussion, contain a mechanism which recognizes time constraints and searches for acceptable solutions efficiently. The other contribution of this study is to provide an architecture which incorporates all of these features and provides a basis for designing intelligent group-decision-support-systems. A generalizable blackboard-based architecture for such a system is described