A distributed decision support system for strategic planning

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in the field of multi-agent theory, offer great promises in modeling strategic planning processes. In this domain, the ability to introduce distinct cognitive agents which cooperate to solve the problem enables the processing of more complex and ill-structured problems. This paper presents a general framework for building a distributed strategic decision support system (DSDSS) which integrates both advances in distributed decision making and distributed artificial intelligence. It goes on to describe a cooperative and distributed system with two specific features: the users intervene as human agents in the solution formation, and strategic knowledge and domain knowledge are distributed in different agents which communicate through various blackboards and message passing. An example is provided in the field of strategic marketing which illustrates how the system operates. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.