There is no mystery as to why people coordinate or cooperate. In a distributed problem-solving environment, self-interested problem solvers coordinate to improve their own self-interests, and to achieve collective goals. However, despite the prevalence of this paradigm of coordination through self-interest in human society, coordination remains a poorly understood phenomenon. Because in part of this status quo, computer technology in general has been conventionally developed to support people's individual work. Computer systems have been built for and used by people to pursue their own isolated tasks. The GIS/MMP-based (geographic information system and multiobjective mathematical programming) coordination model presented in this paper is among the recent efforts to remedy this deficiency. As a prototype organizational decision support system, it provides a framework in which self-interested problem solvers can operate independently but coherently. The case study demonstrated its capability to facilitate distributed environmental planning. The model can be further developed into a distributed artificial intelligence system.
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