Kasprzyk, Joseph听1
1听麻豆影院
In environmental planning problems, decision makers' goals often fundamentally conflict. Faced with limited budgets, planners realize that increasing their systems' performance could cause increased costs, negative impacts to the environment, or conflicts among stakeholders. Multi-objective decision support techniques are increasingly used to generate planning alternatives for such planning problems, with the idea that exposing multiple candidate alternative solutions can positively contribute to the planning process. For example, we have investigated a multi-objective decision support process for water supply planning in the Tarrant Regional Water District of Texas, finding better solutions to balance multiple supply reservoirs. Further work has interfaced with regional stakeholders and decision makers to study how to best incorporate these decision support methods within the utility planning process. Our research group uses multi-objective evolutionary algorithm search, simulation models, interactive visualizations, and high performance computing to solve multi-objective decision support in a number of different domains that span civil and environmental engineering. We have merged approaches of robust decision making with multi-objective optimization in order to find innovative solutions to systems undergoing change.
This presentation will first introduce the methodology for multi-objective decision support. The remainder of the presentation will explore several key areas where multi-objective approaches can add insight to our understanding of environmental problems, in addition to providing new planning alternatives. First, a series of decision support experiments will show that changes to the optimization problem formulation (decision variables, objectives, and constraints) fundamentally alters the solution algorithms' ability to find answers to decision problems. Second, we will show how our approach can contribute to the creation of new environmental regulations, using an example about unconventional oil and gas development.