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.
  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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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