Support for Collaborative and Distributed Decision Making

Abstract

Our research addresses issues of design and implementation of a framework and architecture for distributed decision making. While decision support technologies have been studied for a number of years the emergence of new standards and internet technologies provides us with an opportunity to address current problems in distributed and collaborative decision making. This class of problems has become increasingly relevant with collaborative business models such as supply and demand chains and e-business. In particular, the increasing global nature of organizational work involves collaboration across national boundaries. This has become a common business model and technology support for such activity is the focus of our work. In this paper we discuss the design of a generator that supports distributed decision making. We do this by leveraging emerging standards and technologies like Web Services, SOAP, and WSDL. Features such as ad-hoc integration, location independence and platform independence are supported in a manner that addresses independence, flexibility, interoperability, and workflow management. We present a discussion about a design prototype and associated examples using the stock market as an application domain.