DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR HYBRID VEHICLE RELATED DECISIONS - BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE

Decision making in relation to hybrid vehicles is complicated by a lack of experience with the technology, a wide array of alternatives, and the lack of a clear financial business case. This paper presents a software based decision, decision support tool (DST), which assists understanding of the business case. The DST meets key design objectives of providing a structured process which walks the user through the decision, a decision specific interface and a capability to support a breadth of decisions relevant to a variety of stakeholders. The latter two requirements are met through a software framework which is configured from a database to provide contextual prompts in terminology familiar to the user, avoiding the need to understand the phraseology of decision science. Using the PROMETHEE outranking method, evaluated alternatives are ranked in accordance with inputs from one or more decision makers. Analysis techniques such as sensitivity testing allow the user to test the robustness of the output. Optimal numbers of alternatives can be determined within real-world constraints for decisions such as vehicle fleet composition