The objective of this paper is to characterize the group decision-making process. Three basic questions should be considered in group decision-making: (1) how to extract stakeholders’s knowledge and preferences, (2) how to combine these preferences and knowledge coherently and (3) how to conduct discussions and resolve conflicts. To respond to these questions, this paper distinguishes and discusses several elements characterizing the group decision-making process. More specifically, the paper discusses the following topics: techniques for acquiring stakeholders’s knowledge, aggregation strategies and rules, preference parameters elicitation techniques, stakeholder weighting and conflict resolution. The paper also includes a brief discussion of several real-world case studies in which the authors of this study participated.
