No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present a case study demonstrating how dynamic and uncertain criteria can be incorporated into a multicriteria analysis with the help of discrete event simulation. The simulation guided multicriteria analysis can include both monetary and non-monetary criteria that are static or dynamic, whereas standard multi criteria analysis only deals with static criteria and cost benefit analysis only deals with static monetary criteria. The dynamic and uncertain criteria are incorporated by using simulation to explore how the decision options perform. The results of the simulation are then fed into the multicriteria analysis. By enabling the incorporation of dynamic and uncertain criteria, the dynamic multiple criteria analysis was able to take a unique perspective of the problem. The highest ranked option returned by the dynamic multicriteria analysis differed from the other decision aid techniques.
Due to the fact that basic uncertain information provides a simple form for decision information with certainty degree, it has been developed to reflect the quality of observed or subjective assessments. In order to study the algebra structure and preference relation of basic uncertain information, we develop some algebra operations for basic uncertain information. The order relation of such type of information has also been considered. Finally, to apply the developed algebra operations and order relations, a generalized TODIM method for multi-attribute decision making with basic uncertain information is given. The numerical example shows that the developed decision procedure is valid.
Mountain river torrents and snow avalanches generate human and material damages with dramatic consequences. Knowledge about natural phenomenona is often lacking and expertise is required for decision and risk management purposes using multi-disciplinary quantitative or qualitative approaches. Expertise is considered as a decision process based on imperfect information coming from more or less reliable and conflicting sources. A methodology mixing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multi-criteria aid-decision method, and information fusion using Belief Function Theory is described. Fuzzy Sets and Possibilities theories allow to transform quantitative and qualitative criteria into a common frame of discernment for decision in Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST ) and Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) contexts. Main issues consist in basic belief assignments elicitation, conflict identification and management, fusion rule choices, results validation but also in specific needs to make a difference between importance and reliability and uncertainty in the fusion process.
Risk is traditionally described as the expected likelihood of an undesirable outcome, such as collisions for autonomous vehicles. Accurately predicting risk or potentially risky situations is critical for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. In our previous work, we showed that risk could be characterized by two components: 1) the probability of an undesirable outcome and 2) an estimate of how undesirable the outcome is (loss). This paper is an extension to our previous work. In this paper, using our trained deep reinforcement learning model for navigating around crowds, we developed a risk-based decision-making framework for the autonomous vehicle that integrates the high-level risk-based path planning with the reinforcement learning-based low-level control. We evaluated our method in a high-fidelity simulation such as CARLA. This work can improve safety by allowing an autonomous vehicle to one day avoid and react to risky situations.
Fairness in algorithmic decision-making processes is attracting increasing concern. When an algorithm is applied to human-related decision-making an estimator solely optimizing its predictive power can learn biases on the existing data, which motivates us the notion of fairness in machine learning. while several different notions are studied in the literature, little studies are done on how these notions affect the individuals. We demonstrate such a comparison between several policies induced by well-known fairness criteria, including the color-blind (CB), the demographic parity (DP), and the equalized odds (EO). We show that the EO is the only criterion among them that removes group-level disparity. Empirical studies on the social welfare and disparity of these policies are conducted.
In this work, we introduce a new approach for the efficient solution of autonomous decision and planning problems, with a special focus on decision making under uncertainty and belief space planning (BSP) in high-dimensional state spaces. Usually, to solve the decision problem, we identify the optimal action, according to some objective function. We claim that we can sometimes generate and solve an analogous yet simplified decision problem, which can be solved more efficiently; a wise simplification method can lead to the same action selection, or one for which the maximal loss can be guaranteed. Furthermore, such simplification is separated from the state inference, and does not compromise its accuracy, as the selected action would finally be applied on the original state. First, we present the concept for general decision problems, and provide a theoretical framework for a coherent formulation of the approach. We then practically apply these ideas to BSP problems, which can be simplified by considering a sparse approximation of the initial (Gaussian) belief. The scalable belief sparsification algorithm we provide is able to yield solutions which are guaranteed to be consistent with the original problem. We demonstrate the benefits of the approach in the solution of a highly realistic active-SLAM problem, and manage to significantly reduce computation time, with practically no loss in the quality of solution. This work is conceptual and fundamental, and holds numerous possible extensions.