Abstract: Uncertainty has become an increasing popular subject of analysis in all fields of natural and human sciences today. Traditionally, uncertainty has been considered as something of a nuisance. The prevailing thinking has been that uncertainty is something to be removed by assumptions, and that the problem environment should be made to a well-defined situation first. Uncertainty, however, is part of our living environment, and it allows us to explore possibilities and challenges our potentials. This presentation looks at two general views about uncertainty, ambiguity and vagueness, and organizes the available theories first. It then presents a decision-making situation, in which each stakeholder presents the desire graphically, and the decision is made to maximize the least-satisfied stakeholder's desire, an egalitarian approach to decision. In this process, the uncertainty of the desire of the stakeholders is represented graphically, and the graphs become the means of communication among them. This approach turned out to be a bottom-up decision process, which preserves and uses the uncertainty of the expression of desires as much as possible in the process. This may be a useful approach in today's complex environment of decision-making.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Kikuchi is the Charles E. Via Jr. Professor in the Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Virginia Tech. Dr. Kikuchi came to Virginia Tech in 2005 from the University of Delaware, where he was a professor of transportation engineering/planning for 23 years. He was also employed by Transportation Development Associates and General Motors Corporation prior to his academic career. He received his BS and MS degrees from Hokkaido University, Japan, and a Ph.D. in Civil and Urban Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kikuchi's primary areas of interest are urban transportation planning, urban public transportation systems, highway geometric design and operations, transportation data handling, and logistics. For the past 15years, he has focused his interest in incorporating treatment of uncertainty in the analysis of transportation planning and design. Many of his research projects deal with incomplete data, approximate reasoning, and multi-objective optimization under incomplete causal knowledge. He is the director of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Program of Virginia Tech in the National Capital Region. He is the chair of TRB's Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computation Applications Committee. He is also the co-founder of Annual Helsinki Summer School of Transportation.