The
Decision
Deck project aims at collaboratively
developing Open Source software tools implementing
Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA). Its
purpose is to provide effective tools for three
types of “users”:
- practitioners who use MCDA tools to support
actual decision makers involved in real world
decision problems;
- teachers who present MCDA methods in courses,
for didactic purposes;
- researchers who want to test and compare
methods or to develop new ones.
From a practical point of view, the
Decision Deck
project works on developing multiple softwares
resources that are able to interact. Consequently,
several complementary efforts focusing on different
aspects contribute to
Decision Deck’s
various goals.
The project continuues and expands the series of
activities that have been pursued by the Decision
Deck Communitiy, including at the approval date of
the manifesto:
- D2: a rich open source Java client
offering several MCDA methods, like
-
IRIS (outranking based sorting of
alternatives into ordered classes),
-
RUBIS and
VIP (outranking and additive
aggregation model based methodologies for
the choice decision problem),
-
UTA-GMS/GRIP (ranking alternatives
with a set of value functions);
-
XMCDA: a standardised XML
recommandation to represent objects and data
structures issued from the field of MCDA. Its
main objective is to allow different MCDA
algorithms to interact and be easily callable;
- XMCDA web services:
distributed open source computational MCDA
resources, like the RUBIS solver written in
Python and the KAPPALAB (Choquet integral based
MAVT) R library;
- D3: an open source rich internet
application for XMCDA web services management;
- diviz: an open source Java client and
server for XMCDA web services composition,
workflow management and deployment.
All these efforts involve developments on at least
one of the following research topics of the
Decision Deck
project:
- global architecture of MCDA systems;
- implementations and developments of MCDA
algorithms;
- data models and management of MCDA objects;
- decision process modelling and management;
- graphical user interface.
