Simultaneous Decision Networks with multiple objectives as support for strategic planning

Strategic planning can be schematised as a decision making process where, given a general outline of the desirable future, the decision makers need to choose a set of actions that should coherently lead a system (corporation, institution, city, region, etc.) toward that future. A more sophisticated case is when rather than only choosing actions, the decision maker also decides the allocation of available resources among different available actions. We show that in most cases the problem can be faced using a particular Decision Network with multiple objectives, in which actions are applied simultaneously and are modelled by variables representing the efforts spent on them. The main advantage of the proposed Simultaneous Decision Network is that it can be easily built by a panel of domain experts, under the assumption of the noisy-OR causal interaction. The problem of finding the best strategy in terms of resource allocation is formulated as a combinatorial optimisation, and solved through a multi-objective meta heuristic approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.