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Handling Uncertainty in Engineered Systems

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Handbook of Systems Sciences

Abstract

This chapter identifies essential activities in the tradeoff study process that are responsible for addressing uncertainty and describes how to handle these uncertainties. These activities all involve human decision-making, which is the source of common mistakes arising from confirmation bias, severity amplifiers, and framing. This chapter explains how these activities are affected by mental mistakes such as biases, simplifying heuristics, cognitive illusions, emotions, fallacies, and psychological traps. This chapter presents examples for handling uncertainty by managing mistakes caused by uncertainty in the problem statement, the evaluation criteria, and weights of importance. It also shows how certainty factors and sensitivity analyzes can help handle uncertainty.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Systems Architecting and Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Azad M. Madni

  2. Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    A. Terry Bahill

Authors
  1. Azad M. Madni
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  2. A. Terry Bahill
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. Terry Bahill .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Leadership and Management, Saybrook University, Ashland, KY, USA

    Gary S. Metcalf

  2. Grad Sch of Decision Sci & Tech, Tokyo Institute of Technology Grad Sch of Decision Sci & Tech, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Kyoichi Kijima

  3. CABSSS, Tokyo Institute of Technology CABSSS, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

    Hiroshi Deguchi

Section Editor information

  1. No affiliation provided

    James Martin

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Madni, A.M., Bahill, A.T. (2020). Handling Uncertainty in Engineered Systems. In: Metcalf, G., Kijima, K., Deguchi, H. (eds) Handbook of Systems Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0370-8_22-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0370-8_22-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0370-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0370-8

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