In an event of environmental impact assessment (EIA), encouraging public participation is particular important during the process of open deliberation attributed to the following reasons. First, people may contribute vital environment information to support decision making for the authority in charge. Secondly, through the process of participation, not only satisfying the right of "be aware" for people but establishing the consensus toward a feasible alternative in advance. In the past several years, Decision Support Systems (DSS), through the integration of human intelligence and software engineering, has been widely used to solve semi-structure or ill-structure problems. Nevertheless, DDS is designed for single user. In most situations involving many stockholders, a decision may not be made simply by a single person but by a group of people after reaching some agreement. It is therefore important to develop Group Decision Support System (GDSS) to deal with such problems. The current research employs the concept of GDSS and develops the prototype of a GDSS for promoting "public participation" in EIA. Such system fully integrates various techniques to cover "Delphi", "Certainty Factor", and "3D Geographic Information System (GIS)". "Delphi" is used as the mechanism to facilitate the reduction of dissentient view, while "Certainty Factor" offers an easy yet effective approach to evaluate public opinion under a multi-criteria decision making environment. Finally people can visualize the future landscape of all alternatives with the virtual scene generated by 3D GIS. To make the general public aware the EIA related information, the GDSS also takes full advantage of the Internet to deliver message in multimedia form. The case study to demonstrate the usage of such GDSS is the transportation project of building a sightseeing cross-harbor cable car between Mt. qi-hou and Mt. shou. Through using the GDSS by the stockholders, more people are willing to take part in EIA and thus put "public participation" in practice. In consequence, the authority in charge of EIA may make more appropriate decision in light of the results from public participation.

TEAMDEC is a Group Decision Support System (GDSS). The development of a GDSS is supported by a broad spectrum of theories and techniques. Two major aspects of GDSS development were considered in TEAMDEC design: HCI and decision-making assistance. These two aspects interact to promote an interactive group decision support system with high quality. Decision guidance using a script-based knowledge representation improves the GDSS's efficiency, effectiveness, and flexibility. The traditional script, however, is relatively inflexible. The proposed application, TEAMDEC, provides a set of solutions to support customization in a script system to enhance the decision guidance utilization. The user interface design plays an important role in the overall system design. Two software development models (lifecycle model and V-model with backtracking) are adopted for TEAMDEC development. The user interface design of TEAMDEC is considered from three perspectives: functional, aesthetic, and structural. Quality is emphasized in the development of the interactive system. It can be measured from two perspectives: those of the user and the designer. The quality measures of TEAMDEC are categorized into external properties and internal properties, corresponding to the two perspectives. / Master of Science

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

In the automotive industry, assembly lines are used to produce vehicles. These assembly lines improve throughput, and need to be carefully planned. Planning, or balancing, an assembly line constitutes identifying precedence relationships between tasks in the assembly line, and assigning tasks to stations to fit some criteria. This procedure is costly to do by hand, and is well-suited for some level of automation. The problem of balancing assembly lines has been researched since the 1950’s, but modern assembly lines largely rely on engineers to balance the line by hand. This thesis proposes that the work flow of engineers planning the assembly line would be improved by a group decision support system. This group decision support system could supply engineers with proposals for assembly lines, which the engineers can choose to modify further, either by hand or with the decision support system. The group decision support system is realized with a distributed system, consisting of a front-end, a back-end, an application programming interface to balance assembly lines, and two databases. The front-end is a website, where the users can create problems with a precedence graph. The back-end allows data to be permanently stored in the two databases, and allows communication with the application programming interface. The contribution of this thesis is a proof of concept of a group decision support system that can solve two basic types of assembly line balancing problems, SALBP-1 and SALBP-2. During development it was found that the developed system was generic enough to support different types of tasks, such as planning cooking. Further development is needed to use the system in an industrial setting, as real assembly lines need more complex models than the current version support.