Decision Deck's VIP Analysis to Support Online Collaborative Decision-Making

We present the VIP Analysis plug-in of Decision Deck 1.1, a platform that hosts different evaluation methods to assist decision makers in the collaborative evaluation of alternatives in a multi-criteria and multi-experts setting. VIP Analysis is a tool for aggregation of multicriteria performances by means of an additive value function under imprecise information. It allows conducting a multicriteria analysis for selecting an alternative when the decision makers are not able to (or do not wish to) fix precise values for the importance parameters. These parameters are seen as variables that may take several values subject to constraints. VIP Analysis incorporates different methods to support the progressive reduction of the number of alternatives, introducing a concept of tolerance that lets decision makers use some of the methods in a more flexible manner. The original VIP Analysis was programmed in the late 1990s using Borland Delphi, whereas the Decision Deck version was programmed in Java and accesses data stored as a (possibly remote) MySQL database. Its main innovation is to allow several users working on the same problem under different roles: coordinator, evaluator, and decision-maker.