A linguistic approach to assess the dynamics of design team preference in concept selection
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-Function...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Springer-Verlag
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86158 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-3423 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-1378 |
| Summary: | 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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