Communications Design for Co-Op : a Group Decision Support System

Decision Support Systems which have been typical singleuser systems for most of the decade of their existence, arenow evolving into tools for supporting groups of decisionmakers. Thus, they are merging into the mainstream of officeinformation systems. Communication among multiple decisionmakers has been identified as the major novel issue in suchgroup decision support systems (GDSS) . This paper analyzesthe communications requirements of GDSS and presents a designarchitecture which is integrated in the presentation andapplication layers of the ISO Open Systems Architecture. Thisdesign has been implemented on a network of personal computersin Co-oP, a GDSS for cooperative group decision makingbased on interactive multiple criteria decision making (MCDM)methods