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Values-Informed Decision Support
Published in Evelyn Brister, Robert Frodeman, A Guide to Field Philosophy, 2020
The development of one of our signature tools, values-informed mental models and the ethics coding we created to deploy it, emerged out of attention to differences. One of the projects of the SCRiM grant involved working with partners from RAND4 to improve their efforts to provide resources to the New Orleans Master Plan process through the practice of robust decision-making. Robust decision-making is an analytic framework that works with decision-makers to identify potential robust strategies, characterize the vulnerabilities of such strategies, and evaluate trade-offs among them (www.rand.org/topics/robust-decision-making.html). The process is iterative, as stakeholder values are a key component of how the trade-offs are characterized. However, who is included in the stakeholder group will determine whose values count and whose values might be ignored. We discovered that the range of stakeholders consulted was too narrow to represent the wide range of values perspectives that make up a city like New Orleans. There was the additional issue of future generations whose values preferences might differ from those of current generations. Taking difference into account led us to structure our research in significantly different ways.
Recent advances in seismic soil liquefaction engineering
Published in Reginald E. Hammah, Thamer E. Yacoub, Alison McQuillan, John Curran, The Evolution of Geotech - 25 Years of Innovation, 2021
Although these models are the best of their kind, due to large uncertainties associated with input parameters as well as model errors, more efforts are needed to achieve more precise models in the prediction of lateral spread-type soil deformations. Thus, practicing engineers are warned to be aware of the large uncertainty involved in the predictive models. A probabilistic approach addressing these sources of uncertainties could be a robust decision making approach and is strongly recommended.
Ontology-based uncertainty management approach in designing of robust decision workflows
Published in Journal of Engineering Design, 2019
Ru Wang, Anand Balu Nellippallil, Guoxin Wang, Yan Yan, Janet K. Allen, Farrokh Mistree
In the context of DSPT, robust decision-making refers to a particular set of methods aiming to help human designers identify potential robust strategies under the conditions of complexity and uncertainty. A decision-centric meta-design for the complex system design requires the information flows of the decision processes to be effectively organised and combined, which will assist a human designer in accommodating uncertainty and making a robust decision in design. The traditional design process models, such as the IDEF0, BPMN, and EPC, are unsuitable for describing the information of the existence of uncertainty in the process chain. Phadke (1989) proposes a P-Diagram to represent the quality characteristics of a process/product that is useful for describing a robust design task based on a semantic graphical representation. From the perspective of DBD, the PEI-X diagram has the ability to visualise hierarchical decision processes, which provides a basis for the graphical representation of robust design information between decision-making activities. However, it is difficult to use the P-Diagram and PEI-X diagram to express a series of activities associated with the robust design and the impact of the uncertainty on the decision-making processes. Therefore, it is necessary to use a hierarchical process model with a stronger semantically graphical expression to explicitly depict the value of the parameters interlinked with individual subsystems and the propagation characteristics of the uncertainty in the model and the process chain.
Reliability-based seismic performance of masonry arch bridges
Published in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 2022
Nonetheless, uncertainties related to structural behaviour in the inelastic range, modelling assumptions and assessment methods are not included in deterministic analysis. Although useful in many ways, deterministic models suffer from these limitations. This affects the reliability of the decision-making process and can lead to unsafe bridges, unnecessary strengthening measures or gratuitous replacement of a bridge. To avoid the drawbacks of the deterministic procedure, a reliability-based seismic assessment that explicitly considers the uncertainties seems appealing. It allows quantifying the performance of the bridges both probabilistically and in terms of the reliability index. This results in more robust decision-making criteria.