Knowledge level analysis of group decision support systems

Abstract As Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) have come to play an increasingly important role in supporting and co-ordinating complex organizations, we address the issue of analysing such systems by first understanding the underlying ‘knowledge’ content of group interactions, and then investigating how such interactions affect the knowledge models of each agents. Our approach is novel in that it differs from most other analyses of GDSSs in terms of stressing the importance of the notion of knowledge. We investigate very simple group decision making interactions, and describe the various logic and semantics for such knowledge producing actions. The main theme of this paper is to present a semantical analysis of GDSSs based on a highly developed logical theory of knowledge and knowledge producing group interactions. This analysis can be used to obtain a better understanding of today's GDSSs and to provide a better understanding for design and development of the next generation of GDSSs.