Internet-based collaborative decision-making system for construction

This article presents an Internet-based prototype decision-making system that is designed to ease the difficulties experienced by geographically distributed construction project team members in collaborative decision-making. Its generic features make it applicable to a variety of collaborative decision-making scenarios. The system allows a decision-making team's members to contribute their views on an issue via a client-server system. It encourages objectivity and deals with the 'adversarial culture' in construction project teams through the integration of all team members' views and weighting each decision-maker's importance for a specific decision-making issue. The system also has the ability to handle fuzziness during the process of collaborative decision-making. A hypothetical decision-making scenario is used to demonstrate the prototype system's implementation and operational processes. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.