Multi-criteria option comparison in complex environments

There are many challenging decision-making situations due to high degrees of uncertainty, turbulence, information burden, interdependencies and competing decision criteria in complex environments such as military command and control and emergency response. Unfortunately, few decision support systems help these cognitively challenged decision makers understand the relative desirability of one course of action versus another, also known as option awareness (OA). We hypothesized that providing novel data visualization displays to compare options across multiple criteria in parallel, combined with interaction mechanisms tailored to exploring options, would improve decision makers’ abilities to make better choices more confidently. To test our hypothesis, we created a design inspired by principles of OA and the forementioned challenges and instantiated it in a patented proof-of-concept implementation called the Multi-criteria Option Comparison Application (MOCA). We experimented with MOCA in command and control and emergency response scenarios with subject matter experts and obtained statistically significant quantitative data showing the participants believed their use of a MOCA-like OA application will result in more accurate and confident choices, an enhanced ability to consider multiple perspectives and relevant decision factors, and eight other benefits. Additionally, qualitative data analyses surfaced themes of innovation, discovery, collaboration, ambiguity reduction, assumption validation, and interactivity.