Artificial intelligence based simulation in the design of a GDSS idea generation tool

Little research has been conducted on the software engineering design problems of group decision support systems (GDSS). The authors believe this has been due in part to the lack of powerful system design methodologies, such as Artificial Intelligence Based System Simulation (AISS) techniques and also, in part, due to a lack of research direction. The AISS design methodology described here is split into three stages: the specification of system boundaries using a System Entity Structure (SES), SES pruning and model synthesis using an expert system (ES), and the evaluation of candidate design models using discrete event simulation (DEVS). This paper presents an example of applying AISS to the design of a GDSS Idea Generation tool. Simulation results show that the selected model meets the design criterion of equitable distribution of comments among group participants.