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, here-after called judges, that have to rank several alternatives, are considered. The toolbox is called JUDGES. It includes the four following procedures: &x02022; - a hierarchical representation of the judges allows to display the existing conflicts between groups of judges, &x02022; - enhanced box-plots representations of the alternatives are generated in order to detect those that are responsible for the major conflicts, &x02022; - specific advice is issued to each judge in order to reach more easily a consensus, &x02022; - 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. © 1994.