Study On Distributed Group Decision Support System Based On Coordination Among Functional Departments

In the condition of the continual development of world economic integration, the trend has emerged that the organizational structure of enterprises is becoming more and more geographically decentralized, and the former centralized decision-making mode has faced some challenges; in the meanwhile, the information autonomy of functional departments, which exists in enterprises all the while for some reasons, has reduced the effectiveness of enterprises' decision-making. So a new method of decision-making - the method of coordinated decision-making was brought forward and discussed in this paper. In this method, certain mechanism is set up, so that each interrelated department which has its own interesting and maybe is geographically decentralized is treated as one of the participants, and the enterprise level decision-making is accomplished through the sufficient coordination among the departments by the mean of iterative information exchanging. Because of that this method is based on information exchanging, it is very important to set up a corresponding information system for realizing this method. The corresponding information system was named as Distributed Group Decision Support System based on Coordination among Functional Departments (DGDSSCFD) in this paper. The method of coordinated decision-making and its corresponding information system constituted the main study contents of this paper.Firstly, the significance and background of decision-making method through coordinating among functional departments in modern enterprises were carefully analyzed. And the method of abstracting general rules from particular examples was used to expand the problem of two-department coordinating into the problem of multi-department coordinating. In the course of setting up the general model of coordinated decision-making, some important concepts such as dominant model of decision-making, none-dominant model of decision-making, global vector of decision-making, local vector of decision-making and vector of marginal profit were put forward, and these concepts were used to describe the general model of coordinated decision-making and its corresponding information-exchangingmodel.Secondly, the method of OOA (Object-Orient Analysis) and OOD (Object-Orient Design) was used to set up the system model of the coordinated decision-making process with UML (Unified Modeling Language) in this paper. The boundary, the dynamic model and the static model of the system were described with the graphic tools of UML such as use case diagram, sequence diagram, class diagram and state diagram. In the course of system modeling, the inner structure of the system became clearly, and the conversion from the model of decision-making theory to the model of information processing was accomplished.Next, the implementation problem of the DGDSSCFD mentioned above was studied in the prospect of information system. In the course of study, as one of the important branches of distributed artificial intelligence technology, Multi-agent technology was introduced. According the corresponding theories and methods in multi-agent technology, the framework of the distributed group decision support system with multi-agent coordination was developed. In the framework, the organizational structure of system consists of some units that belong to two classes of basic organization - the basic organization of department and the basic organization of coordination center, and the two classes of basic organization also consists of many agents with interaction. There are two kinds of agents that have the closest relationship with the procedure of coordinated decision-making, they are PSA (Problem Solving Agent) in the basic organization of department and CPCA (Coordination Procedure Controlling Agent) in the basic organization of coordination center. The basic structures of che two kinds of agents were introduced in detail. Then the problem of communication between agents was also studied preliminarily, K.QML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) was selected as the language used by agents in communications, and the concept of "massage-passing bus with KQML" was presented.The establishment of the DSS discussed above is involved with network problems, and needs support from the network infrastructure. But the existing general network technology cannot fulfill the needs. So the concept of "Management Application Area Network (MAAN)" was presented to meet the special needs of management applications. The framework and the composingprinciple of MAAN was discussed, the reference model and the logistic design of MAAN was presented. According to the framework, the implementation scheme of the department routing server and the department role server based on TCP/IP network was developed. It must be pointed out that the MAAN discussed in this paper can not only be used as the basic information platform of DGDSSCFD, but can also be used as the basic information platform of other management applications. This makes the study having more general meaning.At last, the decision-making modeling method of departments was studied in this paper, and a new idea of modeling method named "visible modeling method" was presented. In this method, it was proposed to construct and manipulate decision-making model in a manner of being visible which can be more directly, simple and easy to understand. In this part of study, the whole thought of visible modeling method was put forward; the object-oriented design of modeling procedure was discussed in depth, some basic classes of the visible modeling element were presented; the implementation method of visible control logic in the procedure of modeling was discussed, and the corresponding method was presented; the storage and management manner of objects in existing object-oriented technology were analyzed, and a new method of storing and managing model object was presented, which is that using library file to store and manage basic model object, and using object-oriented database system to store and manage problem model object.