Dealing with imprecise information in group multicriteria decisions: a methodology and a group decision support system architecture

This paper outlines a distributed group decision support system (GDSS) suitable to be used over the Internet, based on the VIP Analysis methodology and software. VIP Analysis incorporates complementary approaches to deal with the aggregation of multicriteria performances by means of an additive value function under imprecise information. This proposed GDSS intends to support a decision panel forming a democractic decision unit, whose members wish to reach a final decision in a choice problem, based on consensus or on some majority rule. Its purpose is not to impose an aggregated model from the individual ones. Rather, the GDSS is designed to reflect to each member the consequences of his/her inputs, confronting them with analogous reflections of the group members' inputs. We propose aggregation procedures to provide a reflection of the group's inputs to each of its members, and an architecture for a GDSS implementing these procedures.