On the Balanced Blending of Formally Structured and Simplified Approaches for Utilizing Judgments of Experts in the Assessment of Uncertain Issues

Expert judgment is frequently employed in the search for the solution to various engineering and decision-making problems where relevant data is not sufficient or where there is little consensus as to the correct models to apply. When expert judgments are required to solve the underlying problem, our main concern is how to formally derive their technical expertise and their personal degree of familiarity about the related questions. Formal methods for gathering judgments from experts and assessing the effects of the judgments on the results of the analysis have been developed in a variety of ways. The most important interest of such methods is to establish the robustness of an expert's knowledge upon which the elicitation of judgments is made and an effective trace of the elicitation process as possible as one can. While the resultant expert judgments can remain to a large extent substantiated with formal elicitation methods, their applicability however is often limited due to restriction of available resources (e.g., time, budget, and number of qualified experts, etc) as well as a scope of the analysis. For this reason, many engineering and decision-making problems have not always performed with a formal/structured pattern, but rather relied on a pertinent transition of the formal process to the simplified approach. The purpose of this paper is (a) to address some insights into the balanced use of formally structured and simplified approaches for the explicit use of expert judgments under resource constraints and (b) to discuss related decision-theoretic issues.