A multi-agent based implementation of a Delphi process

The Delphi protocol is applied when a community of experts is required to reach a consensus and to deliver an answer. In these cases, consensus stands for reaching an agreement among the experts about what the answer should be. This consensus reaching problem has been already considered in the literature, though its automatisation remains as a challenge. Intuitively, the experts should dialogue, interchange ideas, and change their mind as the discussion progresses. This paper presents the first complete-implementation of the Delphi process. This implementation is achieved with a Multi-agent System(MAS), in which the experts are implemented with agents. The presented case study solves the document relevance evaluation problem where a community of experts decide whether a document is relevant or not. In conclusion, this paper makes an important contribution to people using Delphi processes, because the presented system is the first complete-computerised Delphi process. With respect to multi-agent systems, it has the potential to solve coordination in an original way.