Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems

These Proceedings are composed of a selection of papers of the Workshop on Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems, organized by the System and Decision Sciences (SDS) Program of IIASA and the Japan Institute of Systems Research (JISR). The workshop was held at IIASA on August 20-22, 1990. The Methodology of Decision Analysis (MDA) Project of the SDS Program focuses on a system-analytical approach to decision support and is devoted to developing methodology, software and applications of decision support systems concentrated primarily around interactive systems for data analysis, interpretation and multiobjective decisionmaking, including uncertainty analysis and group decision making situations in both their cooperative and noncooperative aspects. The objectives of the research on decision support systems (DSS) performed in cooperation with the MDA Project are to: compare various approaches to decision support systems; advance theory and methodology of decision support; convert existing theories and methodologies into usable (simple to use, user-friendly and robust) tools that could easily be used in solving real-life problems. A principal characteristic of decision support systems is that they must be tuned to specific decision situations, to complex real-life characteristics of every application. Even if the theory and methodology of decision support is quite advanced, every application might provide impulses for further theoretical and methodological advances. Therefore the principle underlying this project is that theoretical and methodological research should be strongly connected to the implementation and applications of its results to sufficiently complicated, real-life examples. This approach results in obtaining really applicable working tools for decision support. The papers for this Proceedings have been selected according to the above summarized framework of the research activities. Therefore, the papers deal both with theoretical and methodological problems and with real-life applications

A Decision Support System for Integrated Risk Management

This report provides a detailed description of the Risk Assessment Support System (RASS) for use in municipal water supply. The report explores the utility of the developed support system for evaluating the performance of a complex water supply system. A regional water supply system for the city of London is used as the case study. The theoretical foundations and computational requirements for the implementation of the RASS are provided in the report.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wrrr/1013/thumbnail.jp

Fuzzy Techniques for Decision Making 2018

Zadeh's fuzzy set theory incorporates the impreciseness of data and evaluations, by imputting the degrees by which each object belongs to a set. Its success fostered theories that codify the subjectivity, uncertainty, imprecision, or roughness of the evaluations. Their rationale is to produce new flexible methodologies in order to model a variety of concrete decision problems more realistically. This Special Issue garners contributions addressing novel tools, techniques and methodologies for decision making (inclusive of both individual and group, single- or multi-criteria decision making) in the context of these theories. It contains 38 research articles that contribute to a variety of setups that combine fuzziness, hesitancy, roughness, covering sets, and linguistic approaches. Their ranges vary from fundamental or technical to applied approaches

Preference extraction and reasoning in negotiation dialogues

Modéliser les préférences des utilisateurs est incontournable dans de nombreux problèmes de la vie courante, que ce soit pour la prise de décision individuelle ou collective ou le raisonnement stratégique par exemple. Cependant, il n'est pas facile de travailler avec les préférences. Comme les agents ne connaissent pas complètement leurs préférences à l'avance, nous avons seulement deux moyens de les déterminer pour pouvoir raisonner ensuite : nous pouvons les inférer soit de ce que les agents disent, soit de leurs actions non-linguistiques. Plusieurs méthodes ont été proposées en Intelligence Artificielle pour apprendre les préférences à partir d'actions non-linguistiques mais à notre connaissance très peu de travaux ont étudié comment éliciter efficacement les préférences verbalisées par les utilisateurs grâce à des méthodes de Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL).Dans ce travail, nous proposons une nouvelle approche pour extraire et raisonner sur les préférences exprimées dans des dialogues de négociation. Après avoir extrait les préférences de chaque tour de dialogue, nous utilisons la structure discursive pour suivre leur évolution au fur et à mesure de la conversation. Nous utilisons les CP-nets, un modèle de représentation des préférences, pour formaliser et raisonner sur ces préférences extraites. Cette méthode est d'abord évaluée sur différents corpus de négociation pour lesquels les résultats montrent que la méthode est prometteuse. Nous l'appliquons ensuite dans sa globalité avec des raisonnements issus de la Théorie des Jeux pour prédire les échanges effectués, ou non, dans le jeu de marchandage Les Colons de Catane. Les résultats obtenus montrent des prédictions significativement meilleures que celles de quatre baselines qui ne gèrent pas correctement le raisonnement stratégique. Cette thèse présente donc une nouvelle approche à la croisée de plusieurs domaines : le Traitement Automatique des Langues (pour l'extraction automatique des préférences et le raisonnement sur leur verbalisation), l'Intelligence Artificielle (pour la modélisation et le raisonnement sur les préférences extraites) et la Théorie des Jeux (pour la prédiction des actions stratégiques dans un jeu de marchandage)Modelling user preferences is crucial in many real-life problems, ranging from individual and collective decision-making to strategic interactions between agents for example. But handling preferences is not easy. Since agents don't come with their preferences transparently given in advance, we have only two means to determine what they are if we wish to exploit them in reasoning: we can infer them from what an agent says or from his nonlinguistic actions. Preference acquisition from nonlinguistic actions has been wildly studied within the Artificial Intelligence community. However, to our knowledge, there has been little work that has so far investigated how preferences can be efficiently elicited from users using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In this work, we propose a new approach to extract and reason on preferences expressed in negotiation dialogues. After having extracted the preferences expressed in each dialogue turn, we use the discursive structure to follow their evolution as the dialogue progresses. We use CP-nets, a model used for the representation of preferences, to formalize and reason about these extracted preferences. The method is first evaluated on different negotiation corpora for which we obtain promising results. We then apply the end-to-end method with principles from Game Theory to predict trades in the win-lose game The Settlers of Catan. Our method shows good results, beating baselines that don't adequately track or reason about preferences. This work thus presents a new approach at the intersection of several research domains: Natural Language Processing (for the automatic preference extraction and the reasoning on their verbalisation), Artificial Intelligence (for the modelling and reasoning on the extracted preferences) and Game Theory (for strategic action prediction in a bargaining game

Practices of Comparing: Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice

Practices of comparing shape how we perceive, organize, and change the world. Supposedly innocent, practices of comparing play a decisive role in forming categories, boundaries, and hierarchies; but they can also give an impetus to question and change such structures. Like almost no other human practice, comparing pervades all social, political, economic, and cultural spheres. This volume outlines the program of a new research agenda that places comparative practices at the center of an interdisciplinary exploration. Its contributions combine case studies with overarching systematic considerations. They show what insights can be gained and which further questions arise when one makes a seemingly trivial practice - comparing - the subject of in-depth research

Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice

Epple A, Erhart W, Grave J, eds. Practices of Comparing. Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. BiUP General. 1st ed. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press; 2020.Practices of comparing shape how we perceive, organize, and change the world. Supposedly innocent, practices of comparing play a decisive role in forming categories, boundaries, and hierarchies; but they can also give an impetus to question and change such structures. Like almost no other human practice, comparing pervades all social, political, economic, and cultural spheres. This volume outlines the program of a new research agenda that places comparative practices at the center of an interdisciplinary exploration. Its contributions combine case studies with overarching systematic considerations. They show what insights can be gained and which further questions arise when one makes a seemingly trivial practice - comparing - the subject of in-depth research

A contribution to multi-criteria decision making in sustainable energy management based on fuzzy and qualitative reasoning

Energy problems are serious problems caused by limited resources and by human activity such as deforestation, water pollution and various other long-term practices that have environmental impact which produces global warming and climate change. These complex problems usually involve multiple conflicting criteria and multiple decision makers. They require the use of multi-criteria decision-making methods to evaluate different types of variables with respect to sustainability factors addressing conflicting economic, technological, social and environmental aspects. These factors, especially social ones, are not always precise, as imprecision and uncertainty are features of the real world. Therefore, in order to provide useful data from experts' assessments, in this thesis a new multi-criteria decision-making method, as a useful tool in energy planning, is presented. This method supports decision makers in all stages of the decision-making process with uncertain values. An exhaustive literature review on multi-criteria decision analysis and energy planning has been conducted in this thesis. First, the in-depth study of criteria and indicators in the energy planning area is presented. Some well-known multi-criteria decision-making methods and their applications are introduced. In these problems, it is often difficult to obtain exact numerical values for some criteria and indicators. In order to overcome this shortcoming, qualitative reasoning techniques integrated with multi-criteria decision-making methods are capable of representing uncertainty, emulating skilled humans, and handling vague situations. This study proposes a Qualitative TOPSIS (Q-TOPSIS) method, which is a new method for ranking multi-criteria alternatives in group decision making. This new method, in its first step, takes into account qualitative data provided by the decision makers' individual linguistic judgments on the performance of alternatives with respect to each criterion, without any previous aggregation or normalization. Then, in its second step, it incorporates the judgments of decision makers into the modified TOPSIS method to generate a complete ranking of alternatives. Three applications of the proposed method in energy planning are presented. In the first case, the application of the Q-TOPSIS method in a case study of renewable energy alternatives selection is presented. These alternatives are ranked and the proposed method is compared with the modified fuzzy TOPSIS method. A simulation of thirty scenarios using different weights demonstrates that the simplicity and interpretability of Q-TOPSIS provides a general improvement over classic TOPSIS in the case of ordinal assessments. Second, a real case study in a social framework to find an appropriate place for wind farm location in Catalonia is presented. In this case different alternatives were proposed based on social actors' preferences for the location of the desired wind farms in a region between the counties of Urgell and Conca de Barbera. Ranking alternatives concludes that an alternative combining two different initial projects is the best option. Using the proposed method to handle a high degree of conflict in group decision making involving multi-dimensional concepts simplified the experts' measurements. Finally, an application to energy efficiency in buildings using the SEMANCO (Semantic tools for carbon reduction in urban planning) platform is presented in order to assess the energy performance and CO2 emissions of projected urban plans at the city level in Manresa. In this case study, an application of Q-TOPSIS helps decision makers to rank different projects with respect to multi-granular quantitative and qualitative criteria and offers outputs which are very easy for decision makers to understand.Los problemas de la energía son problemas graves causados por los recursos limitados y las actividades humanas como la deforestación, contaminación del agua y otras prácticas con efectos a largo plazo. Estas prácticas tienen un gran impacto ambiental y dan lugar al efecto invernadero, que ocasiona el calentamiento global y cambio climático. Los problemas complejos implican generalmente múltiples criterios contradictorios y múltiples decisores. Requieren el uso de métodos toma de decisiones multicriterio para evaluar diferentes tipos de variables con respecto a factores de sostenibilidad, incluyendo aspectos conflictivos económicos, tecnológicos, sociales y ambientales. Estos factores, especialmente los sociales, no siempre son precisos, dado que la imprecisión y la incertidumbre son características del mundo real. Por lo tanto, con el fin de proporcionar datos útiles a partir de evaluaciones de expertos, en esta tesis se presenta un nuevo método de toma de decisiones multicriterio, como una herramienta útil en la planificación de la energía. Este método permite a los decisores utilizar valores con imprecisión en todas las etapas de la toma de decisiones. En esta tesis se ha realizado una revisión exhaustiva de la literatura sobre el análisis de la decisión multicriterio y la planificación de la energía. En primer lugar, se presenta el estudio a fondo de los criterios e indicadores en el área de planificación de la energía. Se introducen algunos de los métodos más conocidos de toma de decisiones multicriterio y sus aplicaciones. En estos problemas, a menudo es difícil obtener valores numéricos exactos para algunos criterios e indicadores. Para superar esta deficiencia, la integración de técnicas de razonamiento cualitativo en métodos de decisión multicriterio permite representar la incertidumbre, emular el trabajo de seres humanos cualificados y manejar situaciones vagas. Este estudio propone un método TOPSIS cualitativo (Q-TOPSIS), que es un nuevo método de ranking de alternativas para la toma de decisiones multicriterio en grupo. Este nuevo método, toma en cuenta los datos cualitativos proporcionados por los juicios lingüísticos individuales de los decisores sin necesidad de previa agregación o normalización. Se presentan tres aplicaciones del método propuesto en la planificación de la energía. En el primer caso, se presenta la aplicación del método Q-TOPSIS en un caso práctico de selección de alternativas de energías renovables. Una simulación de treinta escenarios utilizando diferentes pesos demuestra que la simplicidad y la interpretabilidad de Q-TOPSIS proporcionan una mejora general del TOPSIS clásico en el caso de evaluaciones ordinales. En segundo lugar, se presenta un estudio de un caso real para decidir el lugar apropiado para ubicación de parques eólicos en una zona de Cataluña. En este caso, las distintas alternativas fueron propuestas en base a las preferencias de los actores sociales sobre la ubicación de los parques eólicos deseados en una región entre los condados del Urgell y la Conca de Barberà. El ranking obtenido de las alternativas concluye que la mejor opción es una alternativa que combina dos proyectos iniciales diferentes. La utilización del método propuesto para la decisión en grupo permite manejar un alto grado de conflicto entre conceptos multidimensionales y simplifica las mediciones de los expertos. Por último, se presenta una aplicación a la eficiencia de la energía en edificios mediante la plataforma SEMANCO (Herramientas semánticas para la reducción de carbono en la planificación urbana) para evaluar la eficiencia de la energía y las emisiones de CO2 de planes urbanísticos proyectados en la ciudad de Manresa. En este caso estudio, la aplicación de Q-TOPSIS ayuda a los decisores a realizar el ranking de los diferentes proyectos con respecto a criterios cuantitativos y cualitativos multi-granulares y ofrece resultados fácilmente inteligibles para los decisores

Legal methods for resolving apparent conflicts between fundamental rights

The subject of this thesis are apparent conflicts between fundamental rights, which represent one of the most important problems contemporary legal systems are faced with. More specifically, this thesis presents and analyses different legal methods that have been suggested as answers to the problem. Contemporary constitutions usually contain provisions protecting certain fundamental rights, such as the right to life, the right to privacy, the right to freedom of expression, personality rights, the right to health, etc. The problem can arise when two (or more) provisions protecting fundamental rights are relevant to the specific situation. The question can then arise: should the behaviour be permitted or prohibited? Judges may then be faced with the situation of having to decide the case without any explicit or clear guidance on how to decide the case. In such situations, lex superior, lex posterior and lex specialis are usually inapplicable, because the provisions regulating fundamental rights are usually on the same hierarchical level, were enacted at the same time and no general – special relationship can be established between them. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the norms expressing fundamental rights are generally understood as legal principles, supposedly different from legal rules. These cases are commonly referred to and known in the literature as hard cases. In order to decide such cases and solve the problem we are faced with various legal methods have been proposed. These methods represent possible answers to the problem of the resolution of the apparent conflicts between fundamental rights. The term “apparent” is used, since there is a debate regarding the existence of “real” conflicts between fundamental rights. The objective of the thesis is to provide an answer to the research question: What are the legal methods of resolving apparent conflicts between fundamental rights and what are their merits in comparison to each other? In order to answer the research question, different legal methods that have been suggested as an answer to the problem of apparent conflicts between fundamental rights are presented, analysed and compared. In this way, the thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the different legal methods that have been proposed to solve the problem. To achieve this, the thesis is divided into three main chapters, each of which presents and analyses different legal methods on apparent conflicts between fundamental rights. In Chapter I and Chapter II, the main legal method proposed to resolve apparent conflicts between fundamental rights – judicial balancing – is presented and analysed. In Chapter III, alternative, non-balancing legal methods for resolving apparent conflicts between fundamental rights are presented and analysed. Chapter I presents and analyses Alexyan theory of judicial balancing, developed by Robert Alexy and further refined by his disciples Jan-Reinard Sieckmann, Martin Borowski and Matthias Klatt. Chapter II presents and analyses approaches from Aharon Barak, Manuel Atienza, José Juan Moreso, Riccardo Guastini and Susan Lynn Hurley. In Chapter III, alternative, non-balancing legal methods for resolving apparent conflicts between fundamental rights are presented and analysed. The authors whose approaches are analysed and presented in this chapter are, in this order: Ronald Dworkin, Luigi Ferrajoli, Juan Antonio García Amado, Lorenzo Zucca and Ruth Chang

A Computational Model of Syntactic Processing: Ambiguity Resolution from Interpretation

Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no difficulty coping with it. In fact, the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious. But it is not infallible, however, as example 1 demonstrates. 1. The horse raced past the barn fell. This sentence is perfectly grammatical, as is evident when it appears in the following context: 2. Two horses were being shown off to a prospective buyer. One was raced past a meadow. and the other was raced past a barn. ... Grammatical yet unprocessable sentences such as 1 are called `garden-path sentences.' Their existence provides an opportunity to investigate the human sentence processing mechanism by studying how and when it fails. The aim of this thesis is to construct a computational model of language understanding which can predict processing difficulty. The data to be modeled are known examples of garden path and non-garden path sentences, and other results from psycholinguistics. It is widely believed that there are two distinct loci of computation in sentence processing: syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation. One longstanding controversy is which of these two modules bears responsibility for the immediate resolution of ambiguity. My claim is that it is the latter, and that the syntactic processing module is a very simple device which blindly and faithfully constructs all possible analyses for the sentence up to the current point of processing. The interpretive module serves as a filter, occasionally discarding certain of these analyses which it deems less appropriate for the ongoing discourse than their competitors. This document is divided into three parts. The first is introductory, and reviews a selection of proposals from the sentence processing literature. The second part explores a body of data which has been adduced in support of a theory of structural preferences --- one that is inconsistent with the present claim. I show how the current proposal can be specified to account for the available data, and moreover to predict where structural preference theories will go wrong. The third part is a theoretical investigation of how well the proposed architecture can be realized using current conceptions of linguistic competence. In it, I present a parsing algorithm and a meaning-based ambiguity resolution method.Comment: 128 pages, LaTeX source compressed and uuencoded, figures separate macros: rotate.sty, lingmacros.sty, psfig.tex. Dissertation, Computer and Information Science Dept., October 199

Imperatives of sustainable university excellence: A conceptual framework

This study envisions the architecture of a modern era university with sustainable standards of excellence. Sustainable University Excellence is herein defined as the ability of a university to excel in the core areas of knowledge creation and dissemination via the mobilization of human, social, intellectual, and financial capital to serve on socioeconomic and environmental fronts ethically, efficiently, and effectively to secure a sustainable future. Seven core performance domains of a university are explored: Teaching quality, research culture, technological capability building, accessibility, community engagement, internationalization, and environment, which should be prioritize in order to continuously advance along a sustainable excellence continuum. This study provides a self-assessment methodology that universities can employ to compare their performance relative to the aforementioned domains, thus enabling the identification of performance gaps, the knowledge of which is crucial to the formulation of more targeted strategy. This approach allows decision makers to form a more coherent vision for sustainability within institutional and broader contexts. The approach proposed herein incorporates the three aspects of sustainability that form the so-called Triple Bottom Line (TBL)