Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of describing the decision-making process of a committee of engineers based upon their verbalized linguistic appraisals of alternatives. First, we show a way to model an individual’s evaluation of an alternative through natural language based on the Systemic-Functional Linguistics system of APPRAISAL. The linguistic model accounts for both the degree of intensity and the uncertainty of expressed evaluations. Second, this multi-dimensional linguistic model is converted into a scalar to represent the degree of intensity and a probability distribution function for the stated evaluation. Finally, we present a Markovian model to calculate the time-varying change in preferential probability, the probability that an alternative is the most preferred alternative. We further demonstrate how preferential probability toward attributes of alternatives correspond to preferential probability toward alternatives. We illustrate the method on two case studies to highlight the time-variant dynamics of preferences toward alternatives and attributes. This research contributes to process tracing in descriptive decision science to understand how engineers actually take decisions.
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Notes
An alternative approach would be to normalize the transition matrix at this step such that the axioms of probability are satisfied. We have experimented with this approach and found that it results in the loss of numerical distinction between the preferential probabilities over time. It is thus numerically advantageous not to scale the transition matrix at each iteration, but rather to rescale the preferential probabilities in the final step, Eq. 8.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the participation of the engineering students in the experiments. The work described in this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Award CMMI-0900255. This research was also supported in part under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project Number DP1095601). The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
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Dong, A., Sarkar, S., Yang, M.C. et al. A linguistic approach to assess the dynamics of design team preference in concept selection. Res Eng Design 25, 75–92 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-013-0165-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-013-0165-1