An application of MACRAME to support a multiunit project

Abstract

Several people who are interested in the challenging possibility of producing an innovative light aircraft that utilizes hydrogen as a fuel, have decided to join their efforts in a collective project that involves researchers from different Departments of the Politecnico di Torino and a start-up company from the internal incubator. The main technical decisions were made during the first phase of the decision process, and the others are quite easy to make but the information on the consequences of making or buying decisions, in terms of time, cost and risk, are not shared and are often not present in the context in which the project develops. The authors were invited to participate in order to support project management, i.e. to facilitate communication, coordination and decision-making. The paper proposes our methodological approach to face uncertainties and complexities of these multi-actor decision processes and presents the description of how the tools we chose for this application were integrated and used to elaborate and represent alternative solutions, to collectively evaluate and choose and to create a communication space for the project.