A Multi-agent System for Group Decision Support Based on Conflict Resolution Styles

With the pervasive use of social networks supporting digital communities, the problem of finding a solution to a given problem shared by a group of users that meets the requirements/preferences of its members is gaining great interest in several research domains. Software systems supporting the decision-making process taking place when building "group solution" would greatly enhance the potentiality of these digital communities. In the present work, a Group Decision Support System is proposed to help a group of users to find a set of tourist attractions, selected among a huge set of possible alternatives, that meets the preferences of each individual. The proposed system relies on an automatic negotiation mechanism to incrementally build a single recommendation for the whole group, according to the individual lists of preferred attractions of each member. Negotiation occurs among software agents that simulate different conflict resolution styles of the real users they respectively represent. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the system also when dealing with real end users preferences.