Robust interactive decision-analysis (RID): concepts, methodology, and system principles

The authors propose a novel interactive procedure for performing decision analysis, called robust interactive decision-analysis (RID), which avoids the difficulties in measuring utility and state probability information associated with traditional decision-tree analysis. Instead, the RID method permits a decision-maker to voluntarily and interactively express strong (namely, sure) binary preference for actions, partial decision functions, and full decision functions, and only imprecise probability and utility function assessments. These inputs serve as operators to prune the event probability space and decision space until an optimal choice strategy is obtained. Conceptually, the operation of the RID method can be regarded as a state-space pruning system and the computer implementation of the RID methodology can be viewed as a decision support system. The authors describe the RID methodology and its theoretical developments, illustrate the corresponding state-space pruning system and its properties, and discuss the system principles