British Columbia Gas, a major utility, was required by the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC) to develop an integrated resource plan that addressed multiple objectives and involved the participation of stakeholders. To assist BC Gas, we elicited values separately from most of the senior executives at BC Gas, members of the BCUC, and representatives of several stakeholder groups. Based on these values, we structured a set of objectives and associated performance measures for integrated resource planning (IRP) at BC Gas. A multistakeholder process then provided judgments about appropriate value tradeoffs among these objectives. This information was used in several ways in the IRP process. It fostered improved communication and served as a guide for designing more attractive plans and identifying future information needs. It also provided the basis for a quantitative evaluation of alternative plans and resources. Both the IRP process and the chosen integrated resource plan were reviewed by lawyers representing intervenors at a quasi-judicial hearing of the BCUC. Their concerns are informative in providing lessons for the use of the elicited values in the context of regulatory hearings.

This paper derives an efficient solution procedure for solving the continuous version of the Evans modular design problem. The Kuhn-Tucker conditions are used to derive a dual problem that can be solved easily and whose dual variables indicate which equations should be tight. The technique retains a free-basic solution throughout so that fast solution routines can be employed that are quite similar to those for transportation problems. Computational experience shows that this technique works well on very large problems. We therefore have provided a solution technique for solving a nonlinear problem that has applications to various aspects of the design process.

Calls of two priorities arrive at a single server in accordance with a Poisson process. The calls are served in order of priority and for each priority in a random manner. This paper considers cases of preemptive-resume and nonpreemptive priorities, and derives the moments of the stationary distribution of the waiting time for each priority class. The variance of the waiting time, when the order of service is random, is shown to be greater than the corresponding variance when the order of service is first-in, first-out, and smaller than the corresponding variance when the order of service is last-in, first-out.

This paper gives an explicit formula for the waiting-time distribution in a single-server system with general holding times subject to a Poisson input from any number of priority classes. In the general case, where the holding-time distributions of the demands in each priority case are different, the Laplace-Stieltjes transform and the moments of the distribution are found. The queue discipline is last-come first-served in each priority class. The cases of preemptive resume and nonpreemptive priorities are considered. It is shown that the variance of the waiting-time distribution (whatever the holding-time distribution) is greater than the corresponding variance when the queue discipline is first-come first-served.

This paper employs multiattribute value assessment and risk analysis to evaluate the benefits of four alternatives to improve electrical system reliability in British Columbia. A multiattribute value model is constructed as a cost-equivalent function, based on value judgments provided by a group of senior system planners and two senior vice presidents from BC Hydro. Using data drawn from the utility's service records and probabilities elicited from the utility's technical specialists, a risk analysis is developed to estimate the magnitude and duration of outages associated with the various alternatives. The value model and probabilities are combined to estimate the expected equivalent costs of outages over time, for the four alternatives. The influence of this analysis on BC Hydro's transmission system planning is also discussed.

In stochastic versions of combinatorial optimization problems, the objective is to maximize or minimize a function of random variables. For many problems of this type, conventionally applied dynamic programming (DP) may fail to generate an optimal solution due to the potential violation of the monotonicity assumption of DP. We develop a generalization of DP that guarantees optimality even in the absence of monotonicity. We illustrate the methodology on a version of the stochastic traveling salesman problem for which a previously proposed DP algorithm (E. Kao) is potentially suboptimal due to the violation of monotonicity (M. Sniedovich). Using Generalized DP, we are able to modify the algorithm to guarantee optimality.

This paper analyzes the relationships between personal decisions and premature deaths in the United States. The analysis indicates that over one million of the 2.4 million deaths in 2000 can be attributed to personal decisions and could have been avoided if readily available alternative choices were made. Separate analyses indicate 46% of deaths due to heart disease and 66% of cancer deaths are attributable to personal decisions, about 55% of all deaths for ages 15–64 are attributable to personal decisions, and over 94% of the deaths attributable to personal decisions result in the death of the individual making the decisions. Relative to the current 45%, retrospective appraisal suggests that roughly 5% of deaths in 1900 and 20%–25% of deaths in 1950 could be attributed to personal decisions. These results suggest that more effort directed toward improving personal choices regarding life risks may be an effective and economical way to save lives.

Value trade-offs define how much must be gained in the achievement of one objective to compensate for a lesser achievement on a different objective. Value trade-offs that adequately express a decision maker's values are essential both for good decision making in multiple-objective contexts and for insightful analyses of multiple-objective decisions. This paper identifies and illustrates 12 important mistakes frequently made that limit one's ability to determine useful value trade-offs. It then suggests how to avoid making these mistakes. The intent is to provide practical advice for making good value trade-offs, and hence, better decisions.

The optimal allocation for stratification, parameterized by the respective sampling strategy to use in each stratum, is derived directly from the notion of efficiency. Especially with simulation, there are often opportunities to maximize efficiency (myopically) within each stratum. To maximize efficiency globally, first maximize the efficiency of the sampling strategy for each stratum separately and then use the optimal allocation given these respective maximizers. Given any other allocation, maximizing the efficiency of the sampling strategy in each stratum separately does not give the highest efficiency attainable with that allocation except in degenerate cases. Given a class 𝒞 of deterministic rounding strategies, the rounding of the (continuous) optimal allocation over 𝒞, which maximizes efficiency, cannot be improved by a strategy that randomizes over 𝒞.

This paper uses multiple objective decision analysis to conduct an ex post analysis of a specific fisheries management decision involving conflicting long-term objectives for mixed stocks. The paper illustrates the potential role of subjective judgment in fisheries and other resource management contexts and the relevance of decision analysis for in-season salmon management. The decision context is first defined in terms of objectives and alternatives, then subjective probability distributions are elicited from experts regarding uncertain biological parameters. A simulation is then used to estimate the consequences of alternative openings, given the biological uncertainties. A utility function is elicited from a fisheries manager and used to select among alternative commercial fishery openings. The results show that objectives other than those typically assumed in fisheries modeling, and subjective judgments by technical experts, can be important for in-season salmon management. The results also show that, in this application, the equivalent of nearly $8 million in potential benefits are available from delaying the opening of the commercial fishery by a single day.