Title: Towards optimal effort distribution in process design under uncertainty, with application to education

Authors: Olga Kosheleva; Vladik Kreinovich

Addresses: Department of Teacher Education, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA

Abstract: In most application areas, we need to take care of several (reasonably independent) participants: we want to make sure that all the economic regions prosper, that all the geographic regions have healthy environment, that all the students learn all the needed knowledge and skills. The amount of resources is usually limited, so we face the problem of optimally distributing these resources between different objects. To solve the resulting optimisation problem, we need to know – for each participant i – the utility resulting from investing effort e in the participant. In practice, we only know this value with (interval) uncertainty. So, for each distribution of efforts, instead of a single value of the group utility, we only have an interval of possible values. To compare such intervals, we use Hurwicz optimism–pessimism criterion well justified in decision making. In this paper, we propose a solution to the resulting optimisation problems.

Keywords: interval uncertainty; distribution of effort; optimisation under uncertainty; Hurwicz optimism–pessimism criterion; resource distribution; education; teaching strategies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2012.044306

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2012 Vol.6 No.1/2/3, pp.148 - 166

Accepted: 22 Jul 2011
Published online: 27 Dec 2014 *

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