Architectural Considerations for Decision Analysis Software

摘要

In classic decision theory, it is assumed that a decision-maker can assign precise numerical values corresponding to the true value of each consequence, as well as precise numerical probabilities for their occurrences. However, in real-life situations, the ordering of alternatives from most to least preferred is often a delicate matter and an adequate mathematical representation is crucial. In attempting to address real-life problems, where uncertainty about data prevails, some kind of representation of imprecise information is important and several have been proposed. However, general methods have turned out to be insufficient and we demonstrate in this article that there is not one set of coding techniques that result in the best performing software for decision analysis.