A Web-Based Approach for Visualizing Interactive Decision Maps

Abstract

This research expands the applicability of the Feasible Goals (FGoal) Pareto frontier multiple criteria method to display the Edgeworth–Pareto hull using interactive decision maps (IDMs). Emphasis is placed upon the development of a communication architecture to display the Pareto frontiers, which includes a client device, a web server, and a dedicated computation server implemented with sockets. A standalone application on the latter processes client-server requests and responses to display updated information on the client. Specifically, the dedicated computation server is responsible for calculating the information needed to generate the Edgeworth–Pareto hull. This is delivered to the web server to generate the IDM to be displayed on the client device. The key innovation of this work is a tool that is developed to aid decision-makers with a network-based computational architecture that includes a computational server constantly in communication with a web server for fast responses to client requests to represent IDMs. Results show that this innovation avoids time-consuming communication, and this approach to represent IDMs on the web facilitates collaboration among decision-makers because they can analyze several complex problems in different browser windows and decide which problem and solution better correspond to their aims.

Keywords

• multicriteria decision analysis
• Edgeworth–Pareto hull
• Pareto frontier
• web-based
• decision tools
• forest management