Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management

Chapter 7Decision-Making Processes

Learning Objectives:

After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to do the following:

1. Describe metareasoning and understand its relevance to improving decision making (Introduction).
2. Describe decision-making contexts and identify the decision-making processes that are appropriate for them (Section 7.1).
3. Describe types of decision-making processes, identify their advantages and disadvantages, and identify the situations for which they are appropriate (Sections 7.2–7.5 and 7.11–7.13).
4. Describe the components of decision-making processes, including the analytic-deliberative process (Sections 7.6–7.8).
5. Describe the value of iteration in decision-making processes (Sections 7.7–7.10).
6. Describe the role of search in decision-making processes (Sections 7.14 and 7.15).
7. Analyze a decision-making process as a search (Section 7.14).
8. Construct the optimal strategy for a secretary problem (Section 7.16).
9. Describe a composite decision (Section 7.17).
10. Model a composite decision as a separation (Section 7.18).
11. Describe the decisions made during the product development (Section 7.19).

The preceding chapters of this book focused on techniques for choosing an alternative from a given set of alternatives. These alternatives must be identified and evaluated, however, and improving decision making, therefore, requires improving the process that identifies and evaluates alternatives. Thus, our second perspective on decision making is the decision-making ...