Designing, executing and sharing MCDA workflows via the diviz software and the XMCDA web services"
Résumé
The diviz software is an open-source tool for designing, executing and sharing Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) methods, analyses and experiments. This is made possible through the construction of algorithmic workflows (sequences of connected calculation steps) which rely on the XMCDA web-services proposed by the Decision Deck project (see http://www.decision-deck.org for further details).
The target user community of diviz reaches from researchers who wish to construct algorithmic workflows from elementary MCDA components, to teachers who need to present MCDA methods and let their students experiment them, via consultants who would like to use a given MCDA technique to analyze a real-life decision problem.
Diviz can also be used as a dissemination tool in combination with a research article. Indeed, the authors of a new MCDA technique or researchers who solved a real-life decision problem can propose the corresponding diviz workflow together with an appropriate data set as supplementary electronic material with their article. This will certainly contribute to a larger dissemination of new MCDA algorithms and facilitate their acceptance among many researchers.
Another interesting feature of diviz is more pedagogical: it allows to facilitate the comparison of results issued from different methods on the same decision problem and to tune the input parameters of the various techniques.
This presentation will focus on the latest developments of diviz and the XMCDA web-services. We will detail their use on an example and underline their main features. Note that diviz can be downloaded from http://www.decision-deck.org/divizhttp://www.decision-deck.org/diviz.