Applied Research

Programme: Research of Excellence (CEEX)

Project full title: Group decision support system in public administration and academic environment premises for decentralization and democratization of decision making system

Proposal no:

Priority:

3.1. 3.ICT meeting societal challenges:

For inclusion: to improve equal participation in the information society, preventing digital divides; assistive technology, design-for-all.

3.3.1. ICT meeting societal challenges:

For governments: to achieve world-class public administrations and links between governments and citizens and businesses, supporting democracy.

3. 3.1. ICT supporting businesses and industry

Networked co-operative business processes and optimized work organization and collaborative work environments.

Instrument: Complex Research&Development Projects

Partners: ULBS, CRFCAPL Sibiu, Effective Decision.

Technologies: GDSS.

Concept:

Modern globalized economy has forced public and private organizations to use ICT not only to grow the personal productivity of individual employees (traditional approach), but also to enhance the collaboration among the members (both co-located and remote ones) of various kinds of teams and in order to increase their collective effectiveness. Thus, teams are considered as collections of co-located or remote individuals working for a common goal who must interact extensively in order to achieve this goal. Value is created in an appropriate way, no longer dictated by organizational relations and boundaries.

As the innovative potential of ICT concerning the reform and modernization of public administration has been exploited only to a small extent, the present project assumes the task of broadening and enriching the concept of e-Government, to higher and critical functions, such as decision-making, concerning difficult and complex social problems (this process is directly related to the development of public policies and programmes, as well as their monitoring and evaluation). Some of the functions of critical importance for the public administration require close collaboration among the factors involved (human) and very often participation of citizens, enterprises and their associations as well.

The project aims to increase awareness of collaborative democracy, by providing structure and practices for collaborative governance. The target is to institutionalize the new democratic governance which refers to the following items: credible forums and places for collaboration; meeting the needs of elected officials to connect with the general interest public; linking citizens to decision-making and decision makers; developing networks; treating all players with equal respect; going to scale with collaborative problem solving; understanding collaboration as part of bureaucratic and democratic ethos.

The methodology created through this project explores linkage between deliberative and representative electoral democratic values and practices. As it engages in government both policymakers and the people, one might say that it creates an inclusive management.

The result of the project will be a Group Decision Support System, using an adequate methodology for each environment. Thus, GDSS is an intentional collaborative framework to support and integrate group-decisions anytime/anywhere. It may be defined as an ICT-based collaborative environment, which supports group meeting and decision making processes, in order to improve the productivity and effectiveness of decision-making, either by speeding up the decision-making process, or by improving the quality of the resulting decisions, or both. GDSS attempts to increase the advantages and benefits of group decision making and decrease its disadvantages and dysfunctions. It can facilitate the generation of ideas and also their discussion, analysis, organization, prioritization and finally consensus building.

GDSS can be seen as a type of synchronous collaborative; it offers a variety of tools for supporting synchronous on-line communication and collaboration among several participants, such as: Shared Whiteboard, Synchronous Text Exchange (Text Chat), Synchronous Audio and Video Conference, Shared Applications (e.g. Wordprocesor, Spreadsheet, CAD), File Sharing. It can be very useful in order to achieve increased collaboration awareness, speed and immediate discussion of ad-hoc issues that arise.

ROPARDO (WPCS) Role

ROPARDO (WPCS) plays a major role in all six project phases:

• Fundamental research. Definition of eCollaborative Decision requirements
• System development
• Pilot project implementation
• Integration with other systems
• Technological transfer. System implementation at Lucian Blaga University Sibiu and CTFCAPL Sibiu
• Dissemination and exploitation. Validation of integrated systems

Full title: Group decision support system in public administration and academic environment - premises for decentralization and democratization of decision - making system

Programme: CEEX

Module 1. Complex Research & Development Projects

Thematic fields:

• ICT meeting societal challenges for  inclusion: to improve equal participation in the information society, preventing digital divides; assistive technology, design-for-all
• ICT meeting societal challenges for governments: to achieve world-class public administrations and links between governments and citizens and businesses, supporting democracy
• ICT supporting businesses and industry networked co-operative business processes and optimized work organization and collaborative work environments

Technological platform: Embedded Systems

1. Research on tools for collaborative work in rich virtualized environments. These tools will offer sophisticated services to ensure seamless, stable, dependable and scalable applications for collaborative work. Focus is on support of augmented group presence, visualization, group management, sharing support, seamless interaction, service composition, and semantic modeling of complex groups of workers.

2. Design and develop an innovative method for distributed collaboration at work. The collaborative environment aims to increase creativity and to boost innovation and productivity. It provides collaboration services to make possible the development of flexible, scalable and adaptable tools. They will enable seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents (humans, machines) within distributed, knowledge - rich and virtualized working environments.

3. Realization of a working methodology using an informatics system for group decision assistance, according to the present legislative regulations, including laws on public administration, decisions of the local council, methods of decision used within the academic environment. It aims at facilitating the working process within the special commissions (administrative, academic).

4. Increase of transparency and democratization of the decision - making process, considering the incoming integration within the European Union. The result of this project will allow the organizations to line up to the European standards. 

Assure coherence of the decisional process inside organizations, by referring to the memory of the organization (which includes databases, documents to support the decisions) and also by consulting similar decisions.

Facilitate decentralization process in the context of local autonomy, through the possibility of delocalization of the decision - making processes.

5. Identify behavioral patterns and means of selecting the participants for this kind of processes.

The result of the project will be a Group Decision Support System, using an adequate methodology for each environment. Thus, GDSS is an intentional collaborative framework to support and integrate group-decisions anytime/anywhere.

It may be defined as an ICT-based collaborative environment, which supports group meeting and decision making processes, in order to improve the productivity and effectiveness of decision-making, either by speeding up the decision-making process, or by improving the quality of the resulting decisions, or both. GDSS attempts to increase the advantages and benefits of group decision making and decrease its disadvantages and dysfunctions. It can facilitate the generation of ideas and also their discussion, analysis, organization, prioritization and finally consensus building.

• "Lucian Blaga" University Sibiu
• CRFCAPL Sibiu Regional Center for Continuous Training in Local Public Administration
• Wittmann & Partner Computer Systems
• Effective Decision

The application will be using the state-of-the-art technology in supporting collaborative work.

In order to implement the system a client-server approach should be used because it facilitates the team mobility working experience and assures a maximum security for the internal data.

The key element of the GDSS implementation is the usage of the agent oriented engineering for the development of the product. Generally, a multi-agent system (MAS) is preferable over a centralized system when you need distributives (when the real correspondents are distributed and not dependent of a central point), factorization (because the agents are software programs who correspond to some things not functions like in centralized systems when the real system change the change of the system is made naturally), variability (a MAS has the ability to auto configure so it can respond optimally to a wide range of conditions) and volatility (when it is expected that the system will change frequently a MAS change the issue from modifying all the system to modifying only an agent).

Grounded on these principles, GDSS is to be made from the following agents types:

a) personal assistant represents the user in the system being responsible to assist and maintain its goal and has the roles of adviser, negotiator, observe and informer

b) resource agent provide tools-related services and knowledge for the rest of the system, offering at the same time intelligent access to heterogeneous collection of possible decision tools and data, it will play the roles of provider

c) plan agents correspond to each active plan in the system and can have the roles of mediator and coordinator. It is important to mention that several plan agents can exist for one person because each person can participate to multiple decisions.

Because a GDSS application implies the remote working we choose a web-based interface using the most modern technologies used by Domino/Lotus Notes server and Java technologies. The Domino working environment can be regarded as:

1) a web server

2) a web application development environment

3) an activator for other client than Lotus Notes, for example the web browser.

GDSS server was designed like an open server that is easily integrated on other groupware systems. In this sense, we used Java technology that is most suitable for applications that need to run on different operating platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix and so on). GDSS server is open and allows universities or to other software companies to add new tools (tools can be also web located) that facilitate GDSS adaptation to different organizations and cultures trough practical research. Using a web browser like MS Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or Notes Web Browser the user can participate in discussions, send and receive emails or working with the specific activities related to GDSS.