Mónica Duarte Oliveira, Ana Vieira and Carlos Bana e Costa received the Decision Analysis Practice Award, given annually to the best decision analysis application. The Técnico professors and CEGIST researchers were awarded for their project “Fostering participation and knowledge construction processes in real settings through decision analysis and collaborative value modelling”. The award was presented during the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting, which took place between 15 and 18 October in Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States.

The jury consisted of members of the sponsoring organisations, the Decision Analysis Society and the Society of Decision Professionals. The award consists of a monetary prize and support for the publication of the work in a scientific journal. The winners are invited to present the project at the SDP Annual Conference & Workshops, an event that takes place the following year.

The winning project carried out by the Técnico researchers and professors includes innovative work developed with various organisations, such as the Brazilian Forum for Climate Change, Galp, the Institute for Evidence-Based Health Institute, the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience, INFARMED and various partner health institutions. The three authors share “we are very proud and pleased with the recognition of the practical relevance of our research in decision-aid”.

Decision Analysis is defined as an engineering approach to helping decision makers reach rational decisions. It incorporates systems engineering and decision theory, enhanced by the ability of modern computation to build value-based models and carry out computations needed to deal with complexity in the number of factors, uncertainties and dynamics.