Collaborative Control Theory and Decision Support Systems

Abstract

Collaborative Decision Support Systems, CDSS, depend on cost-effective collaboration among the decision participants. Those may include, in addition to human decision makers, non-human entities such as robots, software and hardware agents, sensors, and autonomous instruments. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact that CCT, the Collaborative Control Theory, has on cyber supported augmentation of collaboration in general, and its proven and potential impacts on CDSS in particular. Three recent case studies are discussed. The correlation between CDSS decision process and quality; and the level of CCT-based collaboration augmentation and the resulting level of Collaborative Intelligence, CI, is presented. It is concluded that while there are clear positive impacts of CCT based augmentation and level of CI, they need to be measured and optimized, not maximized. Further research in this area is also described.