JUDGES - A DESCRIPTIVE GROUP DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR THE RANKING OF ITEMS

A set of tools for group decision support are presented. Decision problems involving several decision makers, hereafter called judges, that have to rank several alternatives, are considered. The toolbox is called JUDGES. It includes the four following procedures: - a hierarchical representation of the judges allows to display the existing conflicts between groups of judges, - enhanced box-plots representations of the alternatives are generated in order to detect those that are responsible for the major conflicts, - specific advice is issued to each judge in order to reach more easily a consensus, - a general framework for a pairwise group preference structure is proposed, and can be used to finalise the decision. These procedures are embedded in an interactive software, implemented on micro-computer, which currently simulates the use on a network. Actual network implementation is foreseen in the near future. Several applications are presented and future developments are discussed.