Option Awareness

MITRE organized a Decision Making in Complex Systems Technical Exchange Meeting at their McLean, Virginia, site this week, and the meeting included valuable presentations on modeling complex systems, visualizing their performance, and supporting decision making.  (Full disclosure: I was one of the speakers.)

At the meeting, Jill Drury and Gary L. Klein discussed their research on option awareness (OA), which is "the perception and comprehension of the relative desirability of available options, as well the underlying factors and trade-offs that explain that desirability."
Their experimental research has shown that OA decision support tools that present the distribution of performance for each option can help decision-makers select the most robust alternatives, understand the factors that affect their performance, and generate new options.
Their collaborators include Mark Pfaff and others at Indiana University.
For more details and examples of the visualization, see their paper in the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, which can be found at http://www.iupui.edu/~grappa/publications/Supporting_Complex_Decision_Making_Through_OA_Pfaff_et_al_2012_JCEDM.pdf

MITRE also recently hosted the 12th International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference.
The conference website is http://www2.mitre.org/public/ndm/index.html.