SYST 473 Syllabus

SYST 573/OR 681

Decision and Risk Analysis

Spring 2008

Instructor: Dr. Andrew Loerch

Office: Science and Tech II, Room 119

Phone: (703) 993-1657 (O)

E-mail: aloerch@gmu.edu

Office Hours: Before or after class, or by appointment

Text: Making Hard Decisions with DecisionTools, by Clemen and Reilly

Software: Logical Decisions for Windows, plus the software that comes with the text

Description: The intent of this course is to provide a modern perspective on analytical methodologies to support decision making. Decision analysis offers a set of structured procedures that assist decision-makers in structuring decision problems and developing creative decision options, quantifying their uncertainty (this includes combining available statistics with expert judgments, and their own beliefs to arrive at estimates of the probabilities of various outcomes), quantifying their preferences (this includes structuring their value tradeoffs and examining their attitude towards risk), combining their uncertainty and preferences to arrive at “good” decisions. This course provides an introductory treatment of decision analysis. The intended participants are students who want to learn more about decision making under uncertainty and tools that can be used to support it. Other information.

Topic Reading Assignment*

Introduction Read Chapt.1

Review of Probability Read Chapt. 7 pg 282, # 7.8, 7.9, 7.15, 7.16, 7.19 Prob HW

Value Focused Thinking Read Handout and Chapt. 6 Keeney Article Affinity Diagram

Value Functions and Weight Elicitation AHP Read Chapt. 4 pg 142-143, 614-621 (Assessing Weights) Single Dim VF HW

Weights and AHP HW AHP HW

Hierarchical Value function HW

Decisions Under Uncertainty Read Chapt. 3 Decision tree HW

Influence Diagrams Read Chapt. 3

Utility Functions Multiattribute Utilility Read Chapt. 15, 16 Utility HW1

Sensitivity Analysis Read Chapt. 5 Utility and Sensitivity

* Homework sets will be assigned on a weekly basis from appropriate problems in the textbook and on handouts.