On knowledge and utility management

This paper contains an extended formulation of decision analyses in the perspectives of classifying real world decision challenges and determining the optimality, significance and effectiveness of decisions. The paper starts out with a summary of the basic and early formulation of decision analysis including the explicit description of limitations. Building upon the basic formulation of decision analysis, this paper introduces a formulation of decision and decision value analyses together with a system state analysis in which the utility distributions and expected utilities are explicitly formulated. This facilitates - beyond the very well know identification of optimal decisions – the quantification of the decision significance and the decision effectiveness. The paper concludes with the description of cases and the summary of the findings.