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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Collaboration and Decision-Making in Context

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description

The goal of this chapter is to provide a historical account of the evolutions in the domain of the book and to set the stage for the concepts and solutions to be presented in the following chapters, including the introduction of the terminology adopted to be used throughout this text. Consequently, we aim at providing the answers to a series of questions, such as: (a) “How the organizations have been evolving over the last decades?”, (b) “Which have been the corresponding trends of the management and control schemes?”, (c) “How management and control functions are allocated to human and automation equipment?”, (d) “Which are the desirable properties of the information processing tools meant to support the human agent to carry out his/her tasks?” The remaining part of this chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, we make a review of the ever increasing complexity of the controlled objects over the last four decades and describe the characteristic features of collaborative networks. Next section contains a historical account of the technology and business-driven evolutions of management and control schemes from hierarchical multilevel control to more cooperative solutions. The third section addresses the role of human agent in management and control tasks. In the fourth section, we present the requirements for the human-centered information tools which are meant to support the activities of the person[s] in charge to make decisions in management and control tasks. A brief review of multi-criteria decision models is made in the fifth section and an interpretation of criteria from a multi-participant decision-maker’s perspective is provided in the fifth, final section.