Tuesday 20 November 2012

Managing Information to Support the Decision Making Process

an article by Arantza Aldea and Simon Skrzypczak (Oxford Brookes University, UK) and René Bañares-Alcántara (University of Oxford, UK) published in Journal of Information & Knowledge Management Volume 11 Issue 3 (September 2012)

Abstract

Decision-making is a crucial activity during the planning, design and operation of artefacts.

To make a decision several alternatives must be evaluated and compared, which are tasks that require information, knowledge and expertise. A system that organises and manages the knowledge associated with every alternative and links ideas, arguments and issues can greatly improve and facilitate the decision making process.

This paper presents how an Issue Based Information System (IBIS) implemented in Compendium (http://compendium.open.ac.uk) has been extended with new functionalities such as access to a toolkit of Multi-Criteria Decision Methods (MCDM), the ability to propagate values throughout the decision records and to perform sensitivity analysis of the recommended decisions with respect to a parameter.

These additional functionalities enable the applicability of the system in the support of decisions that require not only argumentation, but also numerical evaluation of the properties of the alternatives such as those proposed during the design, planning and operation of engineering artefacts.


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