A multilevel model integration for collaborative decision making

Corporate level decision making by multiple decision makers in a consistent way is essential in a Decision Support System. However, since the decision makers have different interests and knowledge, the models used by them are also different in their level of abstraction. This makes decision makers waste a lot of effort for integrated decision making. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integration mechanism so that collaborative decision making models may be used synthetically in multi-abstraction level. Models are classified as multimedia model, mathematical model, qualitative model, causal and directional model, causal model, directional model and relationship model according to the level of abstraction. The proposed integration mechanism consists of model interpretation phase, model transformation phase, and model integration phase. Specifically, the model transformation phase is divided into (1) model tightening mode which gathers information to make a model transformed into upper level model, and (2) model relaxing mode which makes lower level model. In the model integration phase, models of same level are to be integrated schematically. An illustrative M&A-decision example is given to show the possibility of the methodology.