Sensitivity Analysis for Business, Technology, and Policymaking

SimDec is a revolution in decision-making support. SimDec "teases out" inherent cause-and-effect relationships and reveals the intricacy of relationships between sets of input and output variables. At its core, SimDec is an amalgamation of uncertainty and global sensitivity analysis with an innovative visualization technique. While straightforward and elegant, this novel approach significantly enhances the analytical capabilities of users by readily exposing seemingly, a priori, counterintuitive behaviours so that they can be readily understood by both technical specialists and non-technical users alike. This book is the first to articulate the ubiquitous applicability of SimDec and has been written by the leading proponents of the technique. The book provides the necessary background to fully understand the underlying approach and then demonstrates its applicability to a wide spectrum of fields, such as finance, entrepreneurship, energy, 3D manufacturing, geology, the environment, engineering, public policy, and even superconducting magnets. To facilitate as widespread adoption and penetration of SimDec as possible, all supporting computer codes are available, open-source, in Python, Julia, R, and Matlab. The innovative material will be of primary benefit to practitioners and researchers analyzing data from the social sciences, business, science, engineering, mathematics, and computing. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Mariia Kozlova is an associate professor at LUT University Business School, Finland, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, USA. Julian Scott Yeomans is a professor and the director for the MMAI and MBAN programs at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada.

Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgements. PART I: Introduction 1. Methodological landscape of sensitivity analysis and the place of SimDec 2. SimDec algorithm and guidelines for its usage and interpretation 3. Overview of SimDec applications PART II: Applications business 4. Unlocking actionability in financial modeling with Simulation Decomposition 5. Unpacking the role of contextual factors in public support for mitigating revenue risk in public-private partnership projects 6. Printing homes: unit cost estimation for additive manufacturing in construction 7. Where should we go? Deep tech market entry decisions through the lens of uncertainty PART III: Applications: environment 8. Uncertainty considerations in life cycle assessment of COVID-19 masks: single-use versus reusable 9. Model fidelity analysis for sequential decision-making systems using Simulation Decomposition: case study of critical mineral exploration 10. Upgrading the toolbox of techno-economic assessment with SimDec: power-to-X case PART IV: Applications: engineering 11. Capturing multi-dimensional nonlinear behaviour of a steel structure reliability model - global sensitivity analysis 12. Sensitivity analysis of a superconducting magnet design model PART V: Applications: behavioural science 13. New level of personal decision-making: day-to-day choices with SimDec Epilogue Afterword: SimDec meets SIPmath