Towards an Agent-supported Online Assembly: Prototyping a Collaborative Decision-Making Tool

Abstract

The promise of online assemblies has been present for years already, and a diversity of tools have attempted to fulfill it. This work aims to reapproach the issue from a novel standpoint that relies on a federated architecture, a real-time collaborative environment, goal-oriented software agents and a consensus-based methodology. Consensuall is a prototype of consensual decision-making collaborative webtool that allows the elaboration, rating and commenting proposals in order to build consensus among a group. The webtool design follows the AgentOriented Software Engineering paradigm. Thus, it proposes the use of software agents as complementary automatic participants fulfilling specific roles, as a way to address decision-making common issues. The article presents Consensuall, a prototype of an agent-based collaborative decision-making webtool within the distributed real-time collaborative platform Apache Wave, providing a proof-of-concept of the adopted approach.