The Facilitator - An Open Source Effort to Support Multiobjective Decision Making

Multiobjective Decision Support technology has matured to the point where new efforts should incorporate components of existing systems, rather than build everything from scratch. To help such efforts, the Java source code to a multiobjective decision support system called “The Facilitator” has been revised and released under the Mozilla Public License. This open source effort will be of interest to three groups. First, anyone needing a tool for multiobjective decision support can use the Facilitator. Users familiar with Java can now see how actions in the Facilitator are implemented or modify the user interface. Second, the open source approach might appeal to decision support problems that focus on quantifying management effects in a particular problem domain, rather than on developing another multiobjective decision component. Third, those with a different weighting or ranking algorithm for making multiobjective decisions could integrate that algorithm into the Facilitator. The community of researchers developing decision support tools for environmental problems is small relative to the magnitude of environmental problems, making cooperation essential.