General Approaches to Decision-Making

Today, in many different areas, decision-making is required at various management levels—operational, tactical, strategic, etc. The primary purpose of these solutions is to ensure the effective and efficient use of existing resources. The analogical is the situation in the wind energy sector where different decisions are to be taken starting from design, maintenance, and planning to investment. Therefore, in this chapter basic techniques and methods often used to obtain optimal and/or rational solutions are discussed. An effective tool in decision-making is scientific methods to support decision-making using various techniques. Mathematical models are one of the techniques that lead to obtaining reasoned solutions to various problems from many fields. These models are valuable in situations where the initial conditions are known, but the implementation options are sufficiently vague to make a decision. Decision support models can be considered a corrective to cognitive human deficiencies. Through them, it is possible to achieve the integration of different sources of information to determine optimal, Pareto-optimal, or rational solutions. In this regard, this chapter provides a classification of the multicriteria decision problems and techniques for solving them. Special attention is given to the formulation of optimization models, multi-objective optimization, and methods of their solving. Some specifics of combinatorial optimization and decision-making in engineering design are described too.