14.1 Introduction

One of the main issues for the development of a group decision-support system (GDSS) for mobile teams is the mobility of the team members which makes it difficult to identify their locations and co-ordinate their input to collective decisions. Therefore, a key challenge in developing a GDSS for mobile teams is to continuously track the location of each team member and to perform appropriate actions where necessary to maintain the consistency of the decision-making process. Furthermore, mobile workers lack the information required for prompt and accurate decision making when they are not able to access the various information sources within their corporate intranet. Even when each team member is equipped with a mobile device and wireless connection, searching for the necessary information is inconvenient because of connection instability, lower processing capability, inconvenient user interfaces (e.g. virtual keyboard), etc.

In this chapter, an agent-based approach to developing location-based asynchronous group decision support systems is proposed, mPower (a system based on that approach) is introduced, and the way in which the above challenges can be resolved is discussed.

The mPower application adopts a multi-agent system (MAS) approach. The MAS is considered a key technology to support distributed teams. Intelligent, autonomous agents can collaborate to provide opportunities to reduce communications costs, combat information overload, and improve response times [1, 2]. The mPower system contains agents that interact to support distributed group decision-making processes. Each user of the system is supported by...