Knowledge Graphs for Supporting Group Decision Making in Manufacturing Industries

Group decision making is traditionally a human-centered process, where communication, synchronization and agreement are driven by the stakeholders involved. In the area of multi-objective optimization (MOO), this becomes a challenge, because MOO usually produces a large amount of trade-off solutions that need to be analyzed and discussed by the stakeholders. Moreover, for transparent group decision making, it is important that each decision maker is able to trace the entire decision process - from associated data and models to problem formulation and solution generation, as well as to the preferences and analyses of other decision makers. A graph database is capable of capturing such diverse information in the form of a knowledge graph. It can be used to store and query all dependencies and hence can support complex decision-making tasks. Further advantages are the inherent suitability for visualization and the possibilities for pattern matching, graph analytics and, if semantically enriched, to infer new connections in the graph. In this paper, we show how such a knowledge graph can be used to support more transparent and traceable decision-making activities, particularly when multiple stakeholders with differing preferences or perspectives are involved.