Decision support tool for narrowing the scope of discussions on investments in Life Safety inspired by sampling theory

For decisions related to investments in societal safety and health, it is often difficult to balance the discretionary competence of decision-makers with theoretical optimum levels of investment. While removing day-to-day decisions about risk from the political arena would arguably result in better decisions, a full depoliticization is not desirable since public and private risk preferences cannot simply be neglected without negatively affecting the perception of risk and inducing a democratic deficit. Therefore a decision making tool has been developed which allows to narrow the scope of possible decisions for the decision-maker, based on predetermined maximum acceptable deviations from the theoretic optimum investment level. These maximum acceptable deviations may be established by decision-makers themselves on a general basis and may subsequently be applied on a case-by-case basis. In this paper the basic calculation concepts are explained and a detailed example study is presented in which limits for the target safety level of concrete slabs are determined under some specific considerations