EMOTIONALLY ACCEPTABLE DECISION MAKING IN ENGINEERING

Although there are many approaches to decision making, most of them are tools for a Closed World, they do not necessary provide a tool for decision making for such problems which many disciplines are related to and much heuristics or experience are called for. Today, our world is expanding very quickly and the boundaries are disappearing very rapidly. In such an Open World, we need a wide variety of knowledge and experience to make a decision And these pieces are not necessary obtained from the first. As we step forward, we find out what additional information is needed and we change our tracks to pursue better solutions. And constraints also change with progress. In a Closed World, hard constraints remain hard all the way, but in an Open World, hard constraints may change to soft ones later. Thus, how we can manage constraints and how we can postpone our decisions until we have necessary pieces of information are very important in decision making in an Open World. This paper demonstrates that an AT approach provides a very versatile and useful tool for decision making in an open world by taking the case of producing welding procedure specification as an illustrative example.