Retrieval Augmented Decision-Making: A Requirements-Driven, Multi-Criteria Framework for Structured Decision Support

TL;DR

This paper introduces the RAD framework that combines multi-criteria decision making with large language models to provide transparent, structured, and traceable decision support from complex industry documents.

Contribution

It presents a novel method integrating explicit weighting and reasoning chains with LLMs for structured decision support, addressing limitations of existing retrieval-augmented approaches.

Findings

RAD outperforms existing methods in detail and rationality of decision reports.

The framework ensures transparency and traceability in decision-making processes.

Experiments demonstrate RAD's effectiveness in complex decision scenarios.

Abstract

Various industries have produced a large number of documents such as industrial plans, technical guidelines, and regulations that are structurally complex and content-wise fragmented. This poses significant challenges for experts and decision-makers in terms of retrieval and understanding. Although existing LLM-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation methods can provide context-related suggestions, they lack quantitative weighting and traceable reasoning paths, making it difficult to offer multi-level and transparent decision support. To address this issue, this paper proposes the RAD method, which integrates Multi-Criteria Decision Making with the semantic understanding capabilities of LLMs. The method automatically extracts key criteria from industry documents, builds a weighted hierarchical decision model, and generates structured reports under model guidance. The RAD framework introduces explicit weight assignment and reasoning chains in decision generation to ensure accuracy, completeness, and traceability. Experiments show that in various decision-making tasks, the decision reports generated by RAD significantly outperform existing methods in terms of detail, rationality, and structure, demonstrating its application value and potential in complex decision support scenarios.