Enhancing Robustness in Multi-criteria Decision-Making: A Scenario-Based Approach

This paper presents a distributed system facilitating robust decision-making under uncertainty in complex situations often found in strategic emergency management. The construction of decision-relevant scenarios, each being a consistent, coherent and plausible description of a situation and its future development, is used as a rationale for collecting, organizing, filtering and processing information for decision-making. The construction of scenarios is targeted at assessing decision alternatives avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information. The scenarios are constructed in a distributed setting ensuring that each decision can be founded on a coherent and consistent set of assessments and assumptions provided by the best (human or artificial) experts available within limited time. Our theoretical framework is illustrated by means of an emergency management example.