ANDURIL — A MATLAB toolbox for ANalysis and Decisions with UnceRtaInty: Learning from expert judgments

The Classical model (or Cooke’s model) for elicitation and combination of expert judgments has been used in science and engineering since at least the early 1990’s. The most widely used program for applications of this model is EXCALIBUR. However, its code is not available for practitioners, which limits the accessibility and potential of the method. In this paper, we discuss a MATLAB toolbox (ANDURIL11In order to avoid confusion of the minority of people, who are not familiar with the universe of Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, the authors would like to clarify the inspiration for the name of the developed Matlab toolbox. Andúril was the name of the sword of Aragorn, the son of Arathorn, which was reforged from the shards of Narsil (the sword that was used by Isildur to cut the One Ring from Sauron’s hand). Excalibur is also the name of the legendary sword of King Arthur. Similarly to the sword, the source code of EXCALIBUR software remained accessible only to a few worthy ones. Therefore, the researchers and practitioners could only admire and use the software without being able to further investigate and explore developments of the method. To change this, the existing software had to be “broken to pieces” and then “reforged”. Naturally, the name of the resulting new open-source Matlab toolbox is ANDURIL. Hopefully, this will help in bringing peace to troubled researchers and practitioners of Cooke’s classical model. ) intended to fill in this gap. The software has been tested in a recent real-life application reproducing the results of EXCALIBUR. We discuss different advantages for the users from having the developed source code available for practice.