Distributed information systems in group decision making problems

This paper presents the role of distributed information systems in enhancing multiple criteria decision making problems. This goal is achieved showing the architecture and implementation of ELIGERE, a distributed software platform designed to rank a discrete set of alternatives with respect to multiple evaluation criteria. ELIGERE distributed architecture provides several features of interest in group decision making: a web-based interface where experts express their opinion, a remote computational module implementing a multiple criteria decision making method (fuzzy AHP) for ranking the alternatives, a database for collecting both the answer of the experts and the results of the calculations from the computational module. The motivation behind this work is to speed up the concept selection in product design. An illustrative example, the concept selection of a sensored platform for mobile robots, shows how the distributed architecture of ELIGERE results in an enhancement of the concept selection, in terms of both time and experts' interactive experience.