A Bio-Inspired Approach Enabled Group Decision Meetings Facilitation

Abstract

Group decision meetings consume a great deal of time and effort in organizations. Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) provide computational support to group decision-makers to support these processes. However, most of them are perceived to be extremely unproductive in terms of efficiently utilizing the participants’ time and effectively achieving the group decision-meeting objectives. These shortcomings occur frequently because effective guidelines or procedures are not used. To overcome these problems, GDSS would benefit from embedding some facilitation techniques and integrating a human facilitator who guides the group members through the decision-making process. This article proposes a framework for group facilitation that supports facilitators based on a model of the decision-making process where group facilitation tasks are automated, at least partially, increasing the ability of a facilitator to monitor and control the group decision-meeting process. We consider decision support approaches such as bio-inspired optimization methods that potentially offer these capabilities and assist the facilitator and decision-makers. We use the Elephant Herding Optimization (EHO) method to develop the system, and its evaluation is mainly based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We experiment with our approach with the breakdown diagnosis application in a complex industrial system. The results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal.