Group clustering and its visualization in group support systems

Consensus building in group support systems relies on the mutual-question and mutual-elicitation of experts, so a feedback mechanism is required to conduct experts to converge their thinking by visualizing the individual opinion and the consistent state of the group. This paper proposes a new feedback mechanism, which first clusters the experts' preferences into a set of subgroups, and then uses different line-types or line-colors to display the clustered opinions in parallel coordinate. By using this mechanism, the group consistency is analyzed and the group discussion is conducted efficiently. One of the characteristics of the proposed method is that it can protect the minority views automatically. An example is presented to illustrate the application of the method.