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Workshop # 2
Supporting Strategic Decision and Negotiation
Tuesday May, 26
Purpose and Presentations
Strategic decision and negotiation are processes by which an organization
defines its values and operational goals, and formulates a program of
actions (decisions) to deliver these over a planning period, taking into
account and interacting with an environment that includes other
organizations whose actions can affect these values and goals.
The purpose of this workshop is to present frameworks and software
implementations (decision support systems) for supporting strategic
decision and negotiation, and to discuss the field. Descriptions of the
various presentations follow.
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Strategic Decision Support with Soft Computing
by Christer Carlsson
The task discussed is to build a platform with hyperknowledge features to
allow the supported user to work with data, information, knowledge and
solutions from each module in an environment which helps him form new
insights and a better understanding. The intelligent agents are specially
designed software robots which are charged with going out to data sources,
identifying "interesting data", summarizing and condensing the
observations and then reporting back to the user platform for further
actions. Fuzzy logic allows the user to work with problems with imprecise
and spotty data.Fuzzy logic will allow agents to identify "similar" of
"almost similar" news items and work more quickly towards identifying the
most important items.Fuzzy logic will support the use of many databases
in a data warehouse environment by discarding "similar" or "similar, but
older" data items and allowing them to be combined into synthesised
information elements or knowledge items. Optimization tools solve
time-consuming and difficult problems with efficient algorithms. It will
be shown how this platform can be used as a support environment for
handling stragegic planning tasks in a dynamic and complex environment in
an interactive fashion, both individually and as a team.
Christer Carlsson is Professor of Management Science at Abo Akademi
University (Finland) and Director of the Institute for Advanced Management
Systems Research. He has published widely in OR, MCDM, fuzzy sets and
fuzzy logic, information systems, DSS, knowledge based support systems.
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Creating Industry Foresight with Intelligent Agents
by Pirkko Walden
Creating a compelling view of tomorrow's opportunities and moving
pre-emptively to secure the future are not easy tasks, especially when
the company needs to get to the future before the competitors and stake
out a leadership position. Creating the future is done in a rapidly
changing business evnironment where experience is rapidly devalued and
familiar landmarks no longer serve as guideposts. Industry foresight is
about building the best possible assumption base about the future and
thereby developing the prescience needed to proactively shape industry
evolution. There are three critical questions that industry foresight
addresses: (i) what new types of customer benefit should we seek to
provide, (ii)what new competencies will we need to build or acquire to
offer those benefits to the customers, and (iii) how should we reconfigure
the customer interface over the next several years? The intelligent agents
approach (computational programs or entities that act to accomplish
delegated, specialized tasks on behalf of the user) has potential to form
a very effective support environment for industry foresight. We will show
the design principles for a support system built with intelligent agents
and show how it was used to interactively support work on industry
foresight reports.
Pirkko Walden as an associate professor of information systems at the Abo
Akademi University (Finland). Her research activities are focusing on the
use of knowledge-based systems when creating advanced knowledge support
for the strategic management processes.
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A Multi-agent Framework for Strategic Planning Modelling
by Suzanne Pinson
The objective of the distributed strategic decision support system (DSDSS)
presented is to support top-level managers in creating scenarios and
assessing the feasibility and coherence of a plan of actions. We have
incorporated a distributed intelligence artificial architecture into a
strategic DSS. The system is based on the decomposition of the process
into several intelligent cognitive agents which cooperate to solve the
problem. They automatically decompose the problem into sub-problems. They
have the capability to delegate a task if they are not able to solve it.
We are presently developing a generic agent model. It consists of five
active comoponents: the planning and coordination module, the know-how
module, the conflict resolution module, the communication module and the
control module. Due to the difficulty to obtain knowledge from managers,
we designed a system where the managers may interact with the system as
artificial agents. This means that the system is more like an assistant
where both the users and the system contribute to the development of
plans. This framework is applied to a strategic marketing problem.
Suzanne Pinson is Professor of Computer Sciences at University of
Paris-Dauphine (France). She is head of the research group in Artificial
Intelligence and Decision Processes at LAMSADE,a CNRS laboratory.
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Experiences from the Development and Use of the Negoplan and Interneg
Systems
by Gregory Kersten
Negoplan is a Prolog-based environment for simulation of the activities of
intelligent agents and human-system cooperation. It has been used in
several large experiments including international negotiation, trade
negotiation, coordination for forest fire fighting and in a large
application in medical education. InterNeg is a Web site comprising, among
others, two negotiation support sytems. The approach we have recently
applied to the construction of the Negoplan cases bears similarity to the
distributed approach to the development of the InterNeg programs. The
similarity is in the structural representation and the existence of the
Methodologies module in which the specification of the role of the
particular objects is given and the conditions for their use are provided.
The experience in the case construction and management of an InterNeg
development will be discussed.
Gregory Kersten is a Senior Reaearch Scholar at the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a professor at the Carleton
University School of Business (Canada) and the Director of the Centre for
Computed Assisted Management. He has published widely. He is the
principal investigator of the InterNeg project and co-investigator of the
Negoplan project.
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Evolutionary Systems Design, Strategic Decision and Negotiation
by Melvin F. Shakun
With Evolutionary Systems Design (ESD),groups and organizations are viewed
as purposeful complex adaptive systems (PCAS). Both cybernetic and
self-organizing, PCAS involve multiplayer, multicriteria, ill-structured,
evolving, dynamic problems in which agents (players) both cooperate and
conflict. Strategic decision and negotiation with human and/or
artificial agents are purposeful processes exhibited by
PCAS. ESD is a universal (culture independent) general problem
solving, formal modeling/design framework for PCAS. The ESD general
framework can be applied in defining and solving specific problems. In the
workshop, the ESD framework and its computer implementation in supporting
strategic decision and negotiation will be discussed. This includes
telework strategic decision and negotiation on the Internet.
Professor Melvin F. Shakun of the Stern School of Business, New
York University, has developed ESD in a book and in a series of journal
articles.He is widely published in management science. He is
editor-in-chief of the the international journal, GROUP DECISION AND
NEGOTIATION.
Organizer
- Melvin Shakun, University of New York, USA
Further Information
- For further information on the workshop, contact:
Professor Melvin F. Shakun
Stern School of Business
New York University
44 West 4 Street
New York, NY 10012-1146
email: mshakun@stern.nyu.edu
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