| Preference Function Modeling (PFM), a new decision-making methodology, is applied to the case of groups of decision makers. The organization of decision-making groups is discussed, and some rules for modeling decision-making groups are presented. A design for distributed group decision-making PFM software is given. It is based on Trillium/PFM, the existing single-user PFM package. In the distributed system, the preference computation engine runs on the server, and decision makers interact with the system on client machines. The server and clients communicate using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) running over TCP/IP. A subset of the design is implemented for proof of concept. Performance testing of the distributed system shows an acceptable response time of less than one second. |
