Conference Agenda

This work was carried out in order to identify the most advantageous species for sustainable management of an ex-situ breeding farm allowing animal visits. The structuring of the problem led us to identify the alternatives (wild animals) and their criteria evaluation. For this evaluation, in other to respect the heterogeneity of dimensions of the sustainability

and make easer the task of the stakeholders involved in the decision process (e.g. criteria weighting), we used the multiple criteria sorting method KEMIRA-sort. Using this method led to elicit the weight of each criterion and to identify a categorization of animal groups that could enable sustainable management of the ex - situ breeding farm of Wédbila in Burkina Faso (Western Africa). We obtained a result in line with empirically estimation of the principle stakeholder playing the role of Decision Maker. These results confirm the effectiveness of the KEMIRA-sort method and the flexibility of the proposed approach shows its ability to be applied in any other context of sustainable ex-situ livestock farm management.

In a free society, any transformation that affects society as a whole must be supported by a significant fraction of the stakeholders involved in order to be successful in the long term. This applies in particular to the transformation of the energy system towards increased sustainability.

Once a number of possible future scenarios have been identified, it is therefore necessary to determine the attitude of the stakeholders in order to be able to assess the acceptance of corresponding measures in advance. However, surveys are often time-consuming and expensive.

Applying stochastic MCDA methods such as SMAA can contribute to assess stakeholder attitudes towards hypothetical scenarios.

In this approach, uncertainties in data as well as heterogeneities within stakeholders and social groups are systematically addressed. Our contribution is to systematically derive information on the attitudes of stakeholders from preferences observed today under existing uncertainties and to use this information alongside other sources of information to assess the acceptance of what-if scenarios by various stakeholders. This involves formulating and solving an inverse SMAA approach. Our method makes it possible for assessing hypothetical scenarios, if necessary, to dispense with intensive empirical work with stakeholders, but to incorporate such information if it is available. It moreover allows for assessing the robustness of the decision or preferences exploiting geometrical information depending on the underlying MCDA model, in our case Promethee II.

In our talk, we apply our method to the transition to different possible energy scenarios.

Personal values are an overarching concept shaping people’s motives and guiding their decisions and actions. Therefore, important life choices with far-reaching consequences should be considered and made in accordance with ones personal values. In this study, we examine to which extent the most highly prioritized personal values are reflected by the objectives used in the decision-making process and their weights. Determining the amount of objective weights related to the most prioritized personal values with data from real decision-making situations enables us to evaluate whether the resulting decisions of our subjects are actually in line with their personal values.

We analyze data from german students with the help of the Entscheidungsnavi, a free-to-use decision support system that guides a decision process based on the Value-Focused Thinking approach by Keeney. As part of the lecture ‘decision theory ‘, the students were asked to systematically work out a complex decision that was important to them. The Entscheidungsnavi guided the students step by step through the process, starting with a reflection of their personal values. We compare two different settings: In the first setting, the five most prioritized values are automatically considered by the tool when defining the objectives. In the second setting, the decision maker has to define the objectives without this help.