| This project wants to develop three prototypes or models of distributed group support systems intended to support tasks related to information structuring: a system for group discussion and structuring, a group decision support system for quantitative decision support, and a support system for public participation bearing on social issues. In addition to the special requirements and characteristics of each one of these systems, particular consideration is given to their differences and similarities. Their main common point is the importance granted to information structuring. Their differences concern the application domain, the group dimension, the behavior and motivations of the group members, the articulation artifacts used, as well as the preference for a qualitative or quantitative approach to the problem.
In what concerns the quantitative approach, efforts will be put in interactive methods applied to multiobjective linear fractional programming problems (MOLFP). We intend to develop new interactive methods and tools for computing non-dominated solutions and finding the preferred one in MOLFP. A special effort will be made to develop an easy and fast process for the computation phase, while keeping the elicitation of preference information as natural and comfortable as possible and guiding the decision maker in his/her search for the preferred solution.
The quantitative methods and collaboration systems will be tested in the financial planning field. We define financial planning in a company as a structured process of identification and selection of present and future capital investment projects, taking account the financing of these projects over time. The three main roles of financial planning are: (1) To get insight into the feasibility of different strategies and possibly also to generate new alternatives; (2) To clarify the relations between decision alternatives and the (potential) results of these alternatives; (3) To help in finding a stream (or a set of streams) of decision alternatives.
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