Using Intervals for Global Sensitivity Analyses in Multiattribute Value Trees

Sensitivity analyses have been long used to assess the impacts of uncertainties on the outcomes. Several approaches have been suggested, but it has been problematic to get a quick overview of the total impact of the uncertainties. Here it is suggested that interval analyses could be used for global sensitivity analyses and a nuclear emergency case is used to illustrate the method. With intervals the decision maker can include all the possible uncertainties and quickly estimate their combined impact on the outcome. This is especially useful in high-risk decisions where this type of worst case analysis is essential. By varying the intervals it can also be examined which uncertainties have the greatest impact and thus which factors possibly need more consideration. A global sensitivity analysis reveals how stable the outcome is to many small simultaneous variations in the