An Empirical Study of the Consequences of Coordination Modes on Supporting Multicriteria Group Decision Aid Methodologies

At present, distributed group decision-making processes are common practice in networked and information-based organisations. Consequently, an adequate coordination of the activities in a multicriteria group decision process is required to ensure the success of these complicated processes. The coordination modes represent different forms of collaboration that use multicriteria decision aids to aggregate the individuals’ preferences in a consensus schema context. This paper presents the implementation of parallel and sequential coordination methods in a web-based multicriteria group decision support system. We subsequently present an empirical study of the influence of these two coordination methods on the actuation of a collaborative group decision process and the final consensual solution in the context of distributed multicriteria group decision analysis, which represent the loosest and tightest task interdependence.