New Methods for Decision-Focused Integrated Assessment: Multiple Objectives, Risk Evaluation and Visualization

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SBR-9634336 Ellis Hobbs Johns Hopkins University This award was made as part of the Methods and Models for Integrated Assessment competition. It provides funds for the investigators to develop methods that will improve the capability of integrated assessment systems to perform policy relevant modeling and decision evaluation by incorporating: (1) explicit representation of alternative policies; (2) credible physical models and/or the capability to easily modify the system to incorporate alternative model structures and parameters; (3) performance indicators or objectives that address the concerns of the policymaker/user of the system; (4) characterizations of the level and sources of uncertainty associated with model outputs; (5) a user interface that encourages sensitivity analysis and exploration and that effectively communicates tradeoffs among objectives and uncertainties; and (6) the ability to show the implications of alternative value judgments concerning acceptable risks and tradeoffs among objectives. These goals require research in three research areas. The computation issues that will be studied include: (1) rapid generation of nondominated alternatives; (2) identification of stochastically nondominated alternatives when there are multiple objectives; (3) identification of alternatives that perform well on regret-based criteria; and (4) the ability to link a solution in objective space with the corresponding solution in decision space and the value judgments implied by choosing that solution. The visualization issues to be developed focus on effective presentation of information on tradeoffs and risks. Finally, research into system-user dynamics will compare methods for users to save and compare results. The investigators' work in these three areas will be tested in a set of demonstration workshops that are supported by this award. These workshops will use the new modeling and display methods on actual integrated assessments, to see how policy-makers make use o f the new methods. Overall, these improvements should increase the potential for policy recommendations that consider a fuller range of integrated models and possible outcomes.