ESP: an expert system for pre-session group decision support systems planning

The authors present a prototype expert system, the Expert Session Planner (ESP), which is designed to support GDSS (group decision support systems) session facilitators during critical pre-session planning. Its major components are a group selection module, a calendar scheduling module, and a tool selection module. ESP´s advantages are that it allows scarce human facilitator knowledge to be distributed and provides consistency across sessions, provides training for novice session facilitators in the selection of GDSS software, and offers a foundation upon which to build further intelligent support software for group meeting processes. A case study illustrates the use of the expert system for planning a typical group meeting