The paper reports on the engineering principles employed in the design of a Group Decision Support System (GOSS) aiming to encourage the system use in a self-facilitated mode. Given the fact that facilitation in distributed and asynchronous GOSS is rather unfeasible, it is argued that the decision-makers themselves could provide the most effective way to assist the collective problem solving process. In facing its inherent dynamic, the agent-oriented approach is arguably the most natural and appropriate mean to achieve better support for the group decisions. The self-facilitation problem is addressed by establishing a common and meaningful interaction pattern among the group members inspired from the shared plans theory. Firstly, by constraining the dialog between the user and the system it helps to elicit and represent the participants' intentions. Secondly, the agents use these contextual intentions to collaboratively support the actions comprised in the problem solving process. The insights are drawn along our experience with a GOSS tool built in top of a project management software package. The focus is on distributed group meetings where the need for a continuous and integrated support at the organizational level is strongly emphasii.ed in real world settings.
Multi-agent systems, group decision support systems, models for group decision process.
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