The AGAP system: A GDSS for project analysis and evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents the ‘Aid to Groups of Analysis and evaluation of Projects’ (AGAP) system, a distributed group decision support system (GDSS) allowing multiple decision makers to cooperate in the evaluation and selection of investment projects. The system has a state of the art set of economic measures that can be set as criteria for use in several multicriteria decision aid methods. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous usage, and tries to enhance the communications and data sharing during asynchronous group meetings, providing support for decision at individual, inter-personal and collective levels. The system is described at a conceptual level, and compared to some other tools available to achieve the same aims.

Introduction

The recent development of information and communication technologies enabled the implementation of some classes of applications that are broadly classified as GroupWare. Most of these applications try to embody several already developed concepts and non-computational techniques and tools with information technologies, in order to attain better communications and new forms of collaboration among people (or organizational units) engaged in some specific task. Among these one can find:

• Computer-mediated communication systems (CMCS): to use the computer to structure, store, process, and distribute human communications (see [1], [2], [3], [4]).

• Group decision support systems (GDSS): to facilitate the solution of unstructured and semi-structured problems by a group of decision makers working together as a team (see [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]).

Nowadays, both GDSS and CMCS are moving toward providing any time/any place both communication and decision support. Notice that prior GDSS frameworks included the communications and meetings need of support (level one of group support on [5], for instance) but most GDSS research and development effort did focus on supporting small-groups, single-site meetings in a decision room context. Meanwhile many (perhaps most) CMCS applications were devoted to enhance communications among groups engaged in decision making tasks, but usually on different time and place environments and with large groups.

Conventional meetings are held synchronously: all participants attend the meeting at the same time. In asynchronous sessions each participant can “attend” on the schedule that is most convenient to him/her. The latter kind of sessions poses several problems of synchronization of communication processes and of understanding the contextual meaning, like who did vote (if anonymously), who has not participated but will participate in a near future, when to stop a discussion, whether silence means agreement, etc.

We consider that each participant acts as an individual problem solver and concentrates his or her attention on the specific aspect he or she feels relevant. An underlying assumption is that group members can be concerned with different sets of criteria, with different parameters and with different alternatives. Moreover, they can create and test their own alternatives (which may be hypothetical) just to learn, to better understand or to structure their knowledge. Feedback from the group’s points of view and to the representations of the individuals’ points of view is required. Feedback, in this context, means that a group member changes his or her preferences so that they converge to the other group members’ preferences, as perceived by that member (see [10], for a detailed discussion). Thus, we must consider both individual and group problem solving processes and how they interact. In an asynchronous environment this can be a problem: the designer must create appropriate communication structures and protocols that will bring these two processes into synchronization.

Having those issues in mind, a distributed GDSS for investment project analysis and evaluation is being developed where both individual and any time/any place group decision processes are considered. This paper presents the description of the first version of the AGAP (aid to groups of analysis and evaluation of projects) system. The cooperative decision group is small (4–6) and may be geographically disperse. No facilitator or “chauffeur” is explicitly supported, that is, it can be a purely user driven system. Each element of the group has his/her own workstation (a PC) connected to a central unit.

A project analysis and evaluation decision is usually a group decision. To achieve it, it may be needed to integrate several levels of analysis and evaluation, either individual, pair-wise or collective. This can be supported by a general GDSS (like GroupSystems [3], [11]), but it can be argued that a system that provides explicit support (in qualitative and quantitative analysis) for the tasks at hand may be better suited. In this work, a prototype of such a system is presented. This system was designed assuming some characteristics of the decision group (e.g. a cooperative group) and of its interaction (e.g. how they interact, what tasks they will perform). To support such interaction, tools were created, some generic (present in most GDSS) and some specific to the kind of support intended. An added requirement for our design was the need to support explicitly asynchronous as well as synchronous usage, and disconnected (i.e. independent single-user) as well as connected (group, space distributed) usage. This support for both synchronous and asynchronous usage, as well as the support for the several steps of group interaction (individual, interpersonal and collective) are the main contributions of this system. The AGAP system is quite flexible in what concerns structuring the decision problem. There are several pre-defined attributes but the users can define new ones. Moreover, the user can define new attributes as syntactic expressions (involving other attributes) that are computed by the system whenever needed. This allows the group to cooperatively build new alternatives and define the relevant criteria. Another contribution is the integration of quantitative tools both for economic project analysis and for decision making, by supporting several multiple criteria quantitative methods in addition to the most used project evaluation measures.

With the prototype, a small laboratorial test was conducted. Its results, presented here, allowed us to gauge the difference between the previous assessment of group behaviour and actual behaviour with some support tools. The tests were geared to an exploration of different projects, without arriving to an actual selection, as the intention was the exploration of the support tools and decision methodology. These tests suggested changes that are being incorporated in the next version of the system, namely regarding added data structuring and user awareness support.

Section 2 presents the fundamentals of project analysis and evaluation. Then in Section 3 a group information processing model is presented. The design of the AGAP system has this model as a reference. Section 4 presents a short description of the AGAP system. This global perspective is then more detailed in the remaining of the paper. Section 5 focuses on the data and model management sub-systems. The decision process is addressed emphasizing individual support and interaction among the decision group. Section 6 refers some experimental results from the current version of the system and some outcomes from these tests. A comparison of the system with other related systems is made in Section 7. Finally, some future developments of the AGAP system are presented.