Logical Decisions - Classweb

Defining goals and measures. In LDW you define the goals and
measures in the Goals Hierarchy view (View::Goals Hierarchy) or
the Quick Entry view (View::Quick Entry). Both views have the
tree structure of the goals hierarchy.
Goals and measures both have names and ID numbers. Measures
also have a scale, which can be either numbers or text. Scales that
use numbers are defined by their units and their most and least
preferred levels. You define text scales with a set of short
descriptions called labels.
Describing your Alternatives
You describe your alternatives by entering a score (called a level)
for each alternative on each measure. You do this in the Matrix
view (View::Matrix). The matrix view is a spreadsheet with rows
representing alternatives and columns representing measures.
Each cell in the spreadsheet represents the level for a particular
alternative and measure. The levels are either numbers or text,
depending on how you defined the scale for the measure. You
enter a numeric level by typing a number into the cell and enter a
text level by picking from a list of text labels for the measure.
Two other types of levels are available in LDW – probabilistic and
measure category. These are described further in the tutorials
and elsewhere in this manual.
Assessing Your Preferences
After you have defined an alternative's levels on the measures,
you need to tell LDW how it should combine the levels to
compute the alternative's overall score.
You do this by describing your preferences about the relative
importances of the measures and goals. The process of describing
your preferences is called a preference assessment.
Assessing preferences in LDW has two main parts. First, you
define how to convert measure levels to common units, and then
you define the relative importances of the measures and
(optionally) their interactions.
Section 3 -- Quick Start 3-3