Robust decision making

Robust decision-making (RDM) is an iterative decision analytic framework that aims to help identify potential robust strategies, characterize the vulnerabilities of such strategies, and evaluate the tradeoffs among them. RDM focuses on informing decisions under conditions of what is called "deep uncertainty", that is, conditions where the parties to a decision do not know or do not agree on the system model(s) relating actions to consequences or the prior probability distributions for the key input parameters to those model(s).

A wide variety of concepts, methods, and tools have been developed to address decision challenges that confront a large degree of uncertainty. One source of the name "robust decision" was the field of robust design popularized primarily by Genichi Taguchi in the 1980s and early 1990s. Jonathan Rosenhead and colleagues were among the first to lay out a systematic decision framework for robust decisions, in their 1989 book Rational Analysis for a Problematic World. Similar themes have emerged from the literatures on scenario planning, robust control, imprecise probability, and info-gap decision theory and methods. An early review of many of these approaches is contained in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2001.

Robust decision-making (RDM) is a particular set of methods and tools developed over the last decade, primarily by researchers associated with the RAND Corporation, designed to support decision-making and policy analysis under conditions of deep uncertainty.

While often used by researchers to evaluate alternative options, RDM is designed and is often employed as a method for decision support, with a particular focus on helping decision makers identify and design new decision options that may be more robust than those they had originally considered. Often, these more robust options represent adaptive decision strategies designed to evolve over time in response to new information. In addition, RDM can be used to facilitate group decision-making in contentious situations where parties to the decision have strong disagreements about assumptions and values.

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