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Methods and Technologies

Information for beginners ...

In real decision making usually the volume of information exceeds possibilities of a human brain to process all this information correctly.

Here is a simple example: you need to weigh very heavy book package, but you have only food-scale. How can you solve the problem? - Right! To weigh every book separately, and then just sum up the results.

The system analysts, i.e. people used "to put each item on its place" act similarly.

Let's imagine, that you have very hard decision problem: you have to buy a lobster, but all the lobsters differ in quality and price. The system analyst will advise you to solve this difficult multicriteria choice task by the elementary way:

• To define list of simple parameters describing lobsters, such as Color, Smell, Size, Price etc. ;
• To define general parameters you want to estimate (for example - Quality, Money, Time);
• To divide every of these complex general parameters into more simple (for example, the Quality of lobsters can be estimated on a smell, taste, colour, size, etc.);
• To carry through pair comparisons of parameters on their importance (" What is more important for you: Quality or Time, Quality or Money, Time or Money? ", " And within the framework of Quality: smell or taste, smell or colour, colour or size...? "). As a result of this procedure you will get the numeric weight coefficient for every parameter;
• To define Utility function for every parameter, e.g. to tell which values of the parameter to be considered as "good", and which as "bad".
• If you want to invite experts, you have to generalize their answers and to estimate a coordination of their opinions about priority of objects or parameters.

After special processing of your answers and initial information about alternatives the analyst will tell you, in what proportion 100 % of your priorities are shared among the considered variants of the decision. If these variants are alternative - just choose one with the highest priority. Otherwise allocate your resources proportionally to the calculated priorities.

Of course, it's just simplified example. In real tasks everything is much more complicated, but general principles are the same.