(668d) Managing Conflicts Among Decision-Makers in Multiobjective Design and Operations

We present a systematic framework to manage conflicts among multiple decision makers (stakeholders) arising in the multiobjective design and operation of process systems. Conflicts arise because stakeholders have different opinions about objectives and/or on their relative priorities. The proposed framework factors in the opinion of all the stakeholders and computes a compromise solution that seeks to minimize stakeholder dissatisfaction. We propose to use conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR) as a measure of dissatisfaction as this enables a generalization of average and robust metrics considered previously in the literature. A key advantage of the framework is that it does not require the computation of a Pareto front and can thus be used to address problems with many stakeholders and objectives. Examples are presented to illustrate the concepts.