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RDALAB

Risk and Decision Analysis Lab

During a long period, the group has been working in several areas and with different aspects of risk and decision analysis. The primary interest of the research group is on applying scientific procedures of quantitative decision evaluation on real-life decisions in industry and society, as well as developing methods and a surrounding theory facilitating such applications. Recent applications studied include analytic support for public decision making in municipalities and decision evaluation of emergency management strategies.

Most classical decision analysis techniques consist of only a set of straightforward evaluation rules applied to precise numerical estimates of probabilities on uncertain events, utilities and values on consequences, and weights on conflicting objectives. However, to require precise estimates in real-life decision situations is often unrealistic. This is because the nature of most information available to decision makers is often vague and imprecise, be it information for human managers in organisations or for process agents in a distributed computer environment. Due to this, the research within RDALAB has focussed on concepts, models, and evaluation methods extending the expressibility to represent and evaluate numerically imprecise information in decision situations faced by human or artificial decision makers.

Research Focus

The main focus is on human decision makers and prescriptive decision analysis aimed at real problems.  The following key areas are studied:

• Developing fast and robust algorithms for decision evaluation methods used to evaluate decision problems where the underlying information is vague or imprecise.
  
• Develop and integrate new methods for decision evaluation and optimisation into a common computational framework for risk and decision analysis.
  
• Development, refinement, and enhancement of a elicitation methods for decision analysis, in particular multi-criteria and risk aspects.
  
• Implementations of the results in usable software for risk and decision analysis.
  
• Decision analysis applications in real-life decision making by means of case studies.

DecideIT, an example of an implementation born at RDALAB.

Projects

• Societal Decision Making in Planning Processes 2008-2010
  "In a democratic local government setting, taking into account the dissemination of information by current and new media, this will require the decision processes to include citizens as true participants. In order to enable the participation in decision processes, the joint decision-maker/citizen processes must be reasonably transparent and contain support for the analyses of the decisions."
  Researchers: Aron Larsson, Mona Riabacke, Mats Danielson, Love Ekenberg
  Funded by FORMAS
  Project in collaboration with Stockholm University and Örebro University

Academic Partners

• Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
• Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC), Brazil
• The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
• Hanken School of Economics, Finland
• School of International Business at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China
• Plovdiv University, Bulgaria
• Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
• Stockholm University, Sweden
• Örebro University, Sweden
• University of Gävle, Sweden
• Fibre Science and Communication Network (FSCN), Sweden

Group

The research is carried out in a multi-disciplinary fashion, combining philosophy, computer science, business administration, and management science/operations research. RDALAB is a part of DECIDE, the main Swedish research network for decision analysis and a node in the international research community.

Future

Modelling and evaluation of real life risk and decision problems will continue to be the main activities for this group.

• Development of process models for corporate and individual decision making.
  
• Development of optimisation procedures for flexible decision making.
  
• Investigations of the role of mathematical, sociological, psychological and philosophical aspects of decision theory and decision analysis.

Links / Resources