Knowledge Content Library

APEM

Analytica Project Economics Model (APEM)

Provided by: Eric Johnson

I want to improve how people make large complex uncertain high-stakes decisions. I have had the good fortune to be employed by drug development companies, where dozens of decisions like this come along every year. In that time, I developed a workflow for addressing them in a way that leverages the expertise of the people doing the work, but in a way that respects the fact that they have a day job to do, and providing expertise to me is a side project. The gist of the workflow is to develop a model (in a template I call APEM) that assesses key consequences of alternatives, and how these are affected by salient uncertainties. We then take note of the impact (or lack thereof) of the uncertainties on decision ramifications as we determine whether to go bother the expert to get more or better information from them. I have talked about this architecture in conferences, using the "Stone Soup" metaphor.

I am releasing APEM with two aims:

• Help people in similar situations to me do the good work that I value.
• Help to promulgate the workflow, by familiarizing people with a specific example.

Please note that this is a pro bono effort. Nobody is paying me. I am proud of my work, and I want it to be excellent, but I cannot warrant to you that it is free from bugs or suitable for your purposes. If you find any bugs, send them to me (with code, if you can), and I'll help out if I can. My email address is ERJohnson167@gmail.com

Click here to download the Model File and the User Guide.

Keywords: analysis and modeling anamod, risk and uncertainty riskunc, simulation mcsim, strategy table strattab