Designing Humanized Systems for Multiple Criteria Decision Making

Abstract

Triple C is a new visual interactive system which supports the exploration of multicriteria decisions. The novelty of this sytem consists in an overall utilization of Visual Interaction for supporting all the information processing activities related to the task of incrementally defining and analyzing a multicriteria decision situation. This paper reports on how a visual interactive approach can be successfully applied to the design of systems matching the original objectives of Decision Support. Human judgement and creativity are neither substituted with a formal model nor restricted by an inflexible, prescriptive tool. On the contrary, the DSS aims at facilitating and stimulating a learning process in which decision-makers are enabled to incrementally (1) model and refine their views of a specific decision situation, (2) understand the impact of different problem components, (3) question and/or justify their individual choices and preferences, and finally (4) communicate them easily – a crucial factor in group decisions.