DECISION-MAKING IN COMPLEX-SYSTEMS

Individuals, organizations, and governments are often expected to make decisions of far-reaching consequences. Judgment and decision-making capabilities are important facets of human intelligence. Systematic st udies of these topics have commenced only in the 1960s. Simultaneous d evelopments in computer hardware and software and in fields such as ar tificial intelligence have given impetus to the study of human decisio n making from descriptive, normative, and prescriptive points of view. Real-world decision problems am often unstructured and difficult to f ormulate. There am multiple objectives, distributed decision makers an d difficulties in acquiring different types of knowledge needed for pr oblem solving. Human knowledge is often available in natural language with its inherent ambiguity and vagueness. While a human being has onl y ''bounded rationality, '' his intuition and common sense enable him to make good decisions in using qualitative nonnumerical information i n narrow domains of expertise such as medical diagnosis. He has to be supported by decision aids when confronted with situations in complex systems. In this paper, we briefly review decision making in complex s ystems from the point of view of intelligent decision support systems, which applications to the project management task.