Group decision support systems: A brief review

Research in group decision support appeared about 15 years ago. Researchers from many different areas are active:in this new domain: group dynamics, informations systems, mathematical programming, artificial intelligence,... Nevertheless group decision support is not commonly known. It is difficult for a beginner or even an experienced researcher in group decision support to have a comprehensive view of the field, mainly because researchers coming from different areas are interested by different aspects of group decision making and have different vocabularies. In this paper, we try to shortly provide the reader with a comprehensive view. After a short description of the group decision making process, we present some classifications of Group Decision Support Systems followed by some historical comments.