Justifying Public Decisions in Arctic Oil and Gas Development: American and Russian Approaches

Government resource decisions in the Arctic typically involve complex issues; multiple criteria are used to choose among alternatives. This complexity is even greater with petroleum development because of concerns about national energy security, environmental impacts, and economic development. Two decision-aiding techniques may help decision makers clarify their decisions to themselves, the stakeholders, and the general public. The Russian qualitative technique seeks to reduce the number of criteria and find alternative options that may be better than the initial ones. The Western quantitative technique seeks to measure the decision maker's judgement about the utility and certainty of each option. These techniques are applied to two case studies: a decision about gas pipeline routing on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia, and a tool for evaluating applications for development permits on the North Slope of Alaska. The qualitative method is easier to use and may be the best model for people who use numbers infrequently or want to make a claim based on rights. The quantitative method did well at preserving detail and incorporating uncertainty. Both approaches helped to reduce the apparent complexity of the decisions.Les décisions gouvernementales concernant les ressources dans l'Arctique mettent le plus souvent en jeu des questions complexes; un grand nombre de critères sont utilisés en vue de choisir parmi différentes options. Cette complexité s'accroît dans le cas de l'exploitation pétrolière en raison des problèmes entourant la sécurité nationale de l'énergie, les retombées environnementales et le développement économique. Deux techniques d'aide à la décision peuvent inciter les décideurs à clarifier leurs décisions pour eux-mêmes, pour les parties intéressées et pour le grand public. La technique qualitative russe cherche à réduire le nombre de critères et à trouver des solutions de rechange qui pourraient être meilleures que les mesures initiales. La technique quantitative occidentale cherche à mesurer le jugement du décideur sur l'utilité et la certitude de chaque option. Ces techniques sont appliquées à deux études de cas: une décision concernant le tracé d'un gazoduc dans la presqu'île de Iamal en Russie, et un outil permettant d'évaluer les demandes de permis d'exploitation sur le versant Nord de l'Alaska. La méthode qualitative est plus facile à utiliser et peut être le meilleur modèle pour des individus qui n'ont pas l'habitude des chiffres ou qui veulent établir une revendication fondée sur des droits. La méthode quantitative réussit bien à préserver le détail et à intégrer l'incertitude. Les deux approches aidaient à réduire la complexité apparente des décisions

Justifying Public Decisions in Arctic Oil and Gas Development: American and Russian Approaches

Government resource decisions in the Arctic typically involve complex issues; multiple criteria are used to choose among alternatives. This complexity is even greater with petroleum development because of concerns about national energy security, environmental impacts, and economic development. Two decision-aiding techniques may help decision makers clarify their decisions to themselves, the stakeholders, and the general public. The Russian qualitative technique seeks to reduce the number of criteria and find alternative options that may be better than the initial ones. The Western quantitative technique seeks to measure the decision maker* s judgement about the utility and certainty of each option. These techniques are applied to two case studies: a decision about gas pipeline routing on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia, and a tool for evaluating applications for development permits on the North Slope of Alaska. The qualitative method is easier to use and may be the best model for people who use numbers infrequently or want to make a claim based on rights. The quantitative method did well at preserving detail and incorporating uncertainty. Both approaches helped to reduce the apparent complexity of the decisions

Choosing tourist locations: personal verbal decision analysis supported by multimedia

This paper examines how to support individual tourists in choosing locations/accommodation to visit during their stay in a locality. We show how this kind of decision making can be aided through a multi-stage verbal decision making process, including both formal and informal aspects, supported by an information system which can provide descriptions in both text and audio-visual form of the alternative under consideration at each stage of the process. The tourist decision-maker will need a structure in which he or she can express his or her initial preferences verbally. These will not be for named locations but, rather, for descriptions of aspects selected for detailed consideration. Thus we describe the provision of a generic preference structure of aspects on which the decision-maker can identify verbally expressed levels at which all the potential alternatives have been pre-classified. Since this generic structure is unlikely to contain classification information on all the aspects that an individual decision-maker may consider in the particular context, the system gives the decision maker the opportunity to explore particular alternatives (in multimedia where appropriate) to develop verbal descriptions of the levels on criteria which are personally relevant in deciding among alternatives

Case-based Reasoning for Medical Decision Support Tasks: The INRECA Approach

We describe an approach for developing knowledge-based medical decision support systems based on the rather new technology of case-based reasoning. This work is based on the results of the Inreca European project and preliminary results from the Inreca+ project which particularly deals with medical applications. One goal was to start from case-based reasoning technology for technical diagnosis, as it was available among the partners, and ‘scale-up ’ to more general non-technical decision support tasks as typically given in medical domains. Inreca technology is used to build an initial decision support system at the Russian Toxicology Information and Advisory Center in Moscow for diagnosing poison cases that are caused by psychotropes