Some Design Options for Persistent Distributed Information within Group Decision Support Systems

This communication intends to present the group supporting mechanisms that are being built into the AGAP group decision support system (Aid for Group Analysis and evaluation of Projects [6]). In it we make an abridged system description, focusing on AGAP's main components. We then detail the framework that was implemented for supporting distributed groups, namely regarding message passing, data sharing and voting. We then focus on the underlying techniques that support those functions, describing DOCs, permissions and data replication. Finally, some problems with this approach are addressed and an alternative architecture based on distributed objects is presented and discussed.