A preliminary study of a citizen participation system based on consensus for Decision-making Processes

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel approach to a citizen participation system based on consensus reaching processes in the context of Smart Cities. One of the characteristics of the Smart Cities is to involve the citizens in their community's decision-making. The system that we propose here, allows government representatives to raise proposals to the citizen and permit citizens to give their opinions about the proposed problems. As a novelty, citizens can express their opinions with different preference structures (preference orderings, utility values, and fuzzy linguistic preference relations) to make more flexible the system and to close the opinion expression domains to the knowledge degree of users. Moreover, the decision-making is carried out by means of a consensus reaching process to achieve a minimum level of agreement before making a decision. In this way, the final decisions will be better accepted by citizens. To present this preliminary approach, functional and non-functional system requirements along with a few use cases according to the classical development of Software Engineering are shown.