Essentials of Decision Making Under Generalized Uncertainty

The nature of uncertainty and fuzziness is examined with reference to the amount of information available to the decision maker. Obstacles to certainty are identified uncertainty regarding the alternate courses of action, uncertainty about the outcomes of the action, and uncertainty about the decision maker’s preferences. A typology of decision methodologies based on various combinations of knowledge about the representation of preferences and uncertainty or /possibility is presented- Based on this typology, decision analysis methods ranging from statistical decision analysis to various ordinal techniques are reviewed. general approach, the General Multiple Facet Optimization method is proposed as a framework for developing strategies for dealing with a broader range of related problem types.