Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management

Preface

This textbook covers important topics on decision making, presents tools for helping engineers make better decisions, and provides examples to illustrate the concepts and techniques. Students and engineers who study this material and apply these concepts and techniques should become better decision-makers.

Like the products and systems that engineers design, this textbook began as an idea for meeting a need and went through many iterations and revisions over time. In this case, the initial discussions about engineering decision making involved my colleague Linda Schmidt, an expert on design methodologies and design education. She and I discussed how engineers in product development organizations shared information and made decisions, and we decided to begin studying this activity as a system. Then, with our colleague Peter Sandborn, we were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how firms used information about environmental impacts in product development decision making. After studying multiple firms and publishing our results, the next step was to develop a course in which we could share our insights about decision making with others. We jointly developed a course outline, and in the Spring, 2004, semester I taught the course for the first time. Although a traditional decision analysis textbook was used, the course included topics beyond its scope, so I created course notes and expanded them every time I taught the course.

In the meantime, our ...