Decision Structuring.

DOE-DP-STD-3023-98

U. S. DOE Office of Field Management' , " roject Management Prioritization Guide"

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(reference [p]) and its referenced RBP approaches.

Presidential Commission' , " isk Assessment and Risk Management in Regulatory

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Decision Making"(reference [m]).

National Academy of Science' , " cience and Judgment in Risk Assessment"

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(reference [e]).

National Research Council' , " nderstanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a

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Democratic Society"(reference [f]).

National Research Council' , " uilding Consensus Through Risk Assessment and

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Management"(reference [g]).

U. S. DOE Office of Environmental Management' , " isks and the Risk Debate:

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Searching for Common Ground"(Reference [s]).

These documents were reviewed to extract useful RBP insights, but only to the extent that

these insights were not contrary to the concepts in the higher-tier documents.

4.2 Decision Structuring. Formulating decision options is sometimes a difficult challenge.

The formulation of decision alternatives needs to be prepared and reviewed with

considerable care (1) to eliminate biases and gaming, (2) to ensure that all the

infrastructure implications and concomitant effects of the alternatives are appropriately

factored in, and (3) to verify that the alternatives are amenable to treatment with the

proposed prioritization model, e.g., to eliminate interdependencies that the model may not

be equipped to account for.

Decision makers tend to take a negative view of prefabricated decisions that preempt the

use of their judgment and management skills. Similarly, interested parties tend to resent

decision processes that hide their priorities in an opaque analysis, even if the analysis has

done a technically sound job of capturing their values. Therefore, probably the most

important initial steps in RBP may be the proper up-front structuring and formulation of the

problem and decision to be made, the decision objectives or goals to be reached, and the

alternatives or options for reaching these goals. These initial steps may also be the most

difficult steps to do well, given the existence of multiple (and sometimes competing)

decision objectives, the need to make credible decisions despite potential uncertainties, and

the need to accomplish goals with finite resources.

Applications of RBP tend to be most successful when they are seen to illuminate and not

prejudge decisions developed in close collaboration with the decision maker or requestor of

the prioritization.

4.3 Use of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). MAUT is a flexible, quantitative-based

decision analysis technique and management tool for clearly documenting the advantages

and disadvantages of policy choices in a structured framework. It merits special

consideration because it provides rigorous, sound, and demonstrated ways to combine

quantitatively dissimilar measures of costs, risks, and benefits, along with decision maker

preferences, into high-level, aggregated measures that can be used to evaluate

alternatives. Goals of MAUT are to provide a defensible framework for identifying,

organizing, and displaying information needed to support complex policy issues and/or

technical decisions; deriving the logical implications of such information; and providing

insights and recommendations for decision making. MAUT allows full aggregation of

performance measures into one single measure of value that can be used for ranking

alternatives. MAUT techniques can provide a mechanism to facilitate constructive

discussion and mediate potential conflict.