Toward an integrated human-centered knowledge-based collaborative decision making system

Collaboration and the use of knowledge in collaborative decision-making are fundamental to all organizational processes, and have been the subject of research in management and in decision and computer sciences for years. More recently, it has become necessary to integrate human-centered designs and groupwork practices with other aspects of collaborative systems to ensure higher levels of human involvement in task processes. Human-centered systems not only allow greater involvement, but require higher user friendliness, end-user satisfaction, learnability, and so on. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, human involvement enables the system to capture a wider context, create more knowledge and enhance its collaborative and decision making abilities. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a good balance and integration of the human aspects with enabling technologies for knowledge and decision making. This paper presents human-centered decision-making system (HUDS), an architecture for collaborative decision making in a knowledge based system with active human involvement. We discuss its architecture and concentrate on its main features, namely, decision making, knowledge management, and human computer interaction. We also present case studies that can be used to validate our architecture and to show how information and knowledge flow through the designed system. This architecture can be implemented in a variety of networked scenarios which form the basis of our future work and further development.