Democratization of Complex-Problem Solving: Toward Privacy-Aware, Transparent and Inclusive Optimization

Critical operations often involve stakeholders with diverse perspectives, yet centralized optimization assumes participation or private information, neither of which is a priori guaranteed. Additionally, decision-making involves discrete decisions, making optimization computationally challenging. Centralized formulations use approximations to manage complexity, often overlooking stakeholder perspectives, leading to bias. To resolve these challenges, we adopt a privacy-aware participatory-distributed … Read more

An Axiomatic Distance Methodology for Aggregating Multimodal Evaluations

This work introduces a multimodal data aggregation methodology featuring optimization models and algorithms for jointly aggregating heterogenous ordinal and cardinal evaluation inputs into a consensus evaluation. Mathematical modeling components are derived to enforce three types of logical couplings between the collective ordinal and cardinal evaluations: Rating and ranking preferences, numerical and ordinal estimates, and rating … Read more