Decision Analysis with Imprecise Information

Yuan Yuhe

Abstract

As the technology develops rapidly in the past centuries, the world has changed rapidly. While the life span and the quality have increased all over the world, the living environment has become worse over the years. Singapore aims to reduce greenhouse emissions from the Business-As-Usual (BAU) scenario by 7 to 11% by 2020. Numerous strategies have been proposed to evaluate the existing climate mitigation policies. However, there are still shortcomings in the existing approaches as well as the lack of comprehensiveness during the decision making. Furthermore, climate mitigation policies usually involve more than one stakeholder. Therefore, the integration of multiple stakeholders’ opinion is necessary in decision making.

The thesis proposes an integrated method combining SWOT analysis and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. In other words, the proposed methodology combines qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. First of all, the approach utilize the SWOT analysis to aid the decision maker to have a more structured and comprehensive analysis of the criteria that have to considered in to the decision making. Subsequently, AHP method is used to evaluate the decision criteria by pairwise comparison. Survey result is also incorporated into the decision making process to help the stakeholders who have little background knowledge in decision analysis. Last but not least, the method also accounts for the opinion of different stakeholders in the policy making. The method is then illustrated by a case study of Singapore’s climate mitigation policy decision making.

In the thesis, the author suggests various approaches to deal with different degree of information available. The survey to the stakeholders can be designed into a simple 5 point scale rating survey or a more comprehensive AHP rating system with description. In addition, the integration of the stakeholders’ opinion can be achieved by a weighted average approach when there is expert judgement present, or by performing Multiple Attribute Trade-off Analysis (MATA). By introducing the integrated approach incorporating the survey result in decision making, the framework aims to provide a more comprehensive method to aid the decision maker with climate mitigation policy making. Moreover, the involvement of multiple stakeholders is another key contribution of the thesis. In conclusion, the thesis aims to enhance the decision making to evaluate the effectiveness of climate mitigation policies in the local context.