학술논문

From Measurement to Decision: Sensitivity of Decision Outcome to Input and Model Uncertainties
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas. Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on. 68(9):3100-3108 Sep, 2019
Subject
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Measurement uncertainty
Phase change materials
Uncertainty
Decision making
Atmospheric measurements
Particle measurements
Perturbation methods
multicriteria decision-making (MCDM)
quality function
sensitivity analysis
Language
ISSN
0018-9456
1557-9662
Abstract
While formal and rigorous procedures are adopted to ensure the reliability of measurement results, the decision-making activities based on the information returned by measurement are often poorly structured and based on vague assumptions and reasoning, thus negatively impacting the reliability of the achieved conclusion. To overcome this problem, a structured multicriteria decision-making approach based on the analytic hierarchy process was recently proposed in the literature to properly support decision-making activities by exploiting the information provided by measurement results related to heterogeneous properties and its application was demonstrated in a case study. Using the same case study, this paper analyses the sensitivity of the obtained conclusion to various uncertainty sources that are embedded in that approach. In particular, the impact of uncertainties on both measurement and pairwise comparisons of the criteria is analyzed and their combined effect is evaluated by considering a worst case situation. Moreover, the effect of the formula adopted to aggregate the information returned by the measurement of heterogeneous properties on the final decision is considered. The performed analysis contributes to support a disciplined and methodologically sound implementation of decision-making activities, significantly improving both the repeatability and reproducibility of the whole evaluation process, as well as the confidence in the achieved conclusions.