Abstract
Environmental decision making has to deal with trade-offs between social, political, environmental, and economic impacts, with different stakeholders' views, which rely on expert knowledge and expertise. This chapter describes how such environmental decision processes can be explored, analyzed, documented, and formalized. Decisions in this problem area depend notably on expertise and experience acquired by all involved decision makers. In this chapter, a collaborative approach is developed and applied that integrates the stakeholders as a partner into the modeling process. After the decision process is documented using the card game CUTA4BPM, all information, which leads up to a decision, will be collected, systemized, and grouped using supplementary paper cards. The outcome of this modeling leads to a formalized model of the decision process. On account of this approach, the real decision process is modeled and increases trust in the decisions suggested by a decision support system later on. This collaborative approach is evaluated by a case study in crop planning.
TopBackground
For environmental decision making, the documentation of the decision process is useful, and an introduction of a DSS can be helpful for improving the decision making. The development of such a DSS needs expertise from three different research areas:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaborative Approach: A collaborative modeling involves different stakeholders in the design process, e.g., in the development of a model. This involvement may range from mere feedback by the domain experts to group sessions where all stakeholders meet to contribute.
Participatory Design: Participatory design is an approach to actively involve all stakeholders in a design process so that the designed product meets the needs of the stakeholders.
Process Modeling: Process modeling is an activity of representing the processes of an enterprise in order to analyze and improve this process. The modeling activity is usually performed by a business analyst or manager.
Model-Driven Development: Model-driven development (MDD) is a software development approach which relies on models as main artifacts. The gap between specification and implementation (between model and code) can be bridged by (semi)automated transformation.
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis: Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a field of operations research dealing with the development and application of decision support tools and methodologies to address complex decision problems involving multiple criteria objectives of conflicting nature. MCDA includes methods for problem structuring and criteria aggregation used to rank a set of alternative options.
Decision Support System: A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based application that collects, organizes and analyzes data to facilitate business decision making for management, operations and planning.
Participative Card Game: A participatory card game is a participatory technique for modeling, analyzing and redesigning task flows. A card represents a task in a process respective task flow. Because of the similarity to usual playing cards, a participatory card game is easy to learn and to use by all stakeholders and can therefore support participative design.