From Measurement to Decision: Sensitivity of Decision Outcome to Input and Model Uncertainties

While formal and rigorous procedures are adopted to ensure the reliability of measurement results, the decisionmaking activities based on the information returned by measurement are often poorly structured and based on vague assumptions and reasoning, thus negatively impacting the reliability of the achieved conclusion. To overcome this problem, a structured multicriteria decision-making approach based on the analytic hierarchy process was recently proposed in the literature to properly support decision-making activities by exploiting the information provided by measurement results related to heterogeneous properties and its application was demonstrated in a case study. Using the same case study, this paper analyses the sensitivity of the obtained conclusion to various uncertainty sources that are embedded in that approach. In particular, the impact of uncertainties on both measurement and pairwise comparisons of the criteria is analyzed and their combined effect is evaluated by considering a worst case situation. Moreover, the effect of the formula adopted to aggregate the information returned by the measurement of heterogeneous properties on the final decision is considered. The performed analysis contributes to support a disciplined and methodologically sound implementation of decision-making activities, significantly improving both the repeatability and reproducibility of the whole evaluation process, as well as the confidence in the achieved conclusions.