Discrepancies and Analogies in Artificial Intelligence and Engineering Design Approaches in Addressing Collaborative Decision-Making

One of the trends in the decision-making field in the past 20 years has been the migration from individual decision-making to collective one. Several changes of working conditions influenced this trend: geographical dispersion due to the business internationalisation, concurrent work in order to satisfy time delays, facilitation of the information sharing induced by the development of local area networks (LAN), and internet. This study examines the discrepancies and analogies in addressing the collaborative decision making in two scientific fields: artificial intelligence and engineering design. These two fields have different considerations and approaches in view to the decision-making support. This paper exposes a comparative study concerning two research studies, both decision support oriented: the first one concerns the collaborative decision-making in early design stages in vehicle development projects (Jankovic, Bocquet, Stal Le Cardinal, & Bavoux, 2006) and the second one concerns the development of an architecture of a Cooperative decision Support Systems (CDSS) (Zaraté, 2005).