DANA Software

1. Conflict analysis: Since version 1.3.0, DANA calculated the utility of a single tactic on the basis of ALL goals. By consequence, this utility included the utility of "no change" in the goal factors that are not affected by the tactic. This often led to overinflated conflict scores.
   In this new version 1.3.3, DANA only adds up the utility over the goals to which there exists a path from the evaluated tactic.
   NOTE: When evaluating a single tactic, DANA also takes into account changes caused by prospects.
2. Issue linkage analysis: One minor bug (# conflicting interests was represented as a percentage) and one bigger one (percentages were computed not relative to the count in the row arena, but to the total number of factors in both arenas) have been fixed.
   NOTE: DANA calculates same/conflicting interests by looking only at goals and actions, testing in each arena which change direction (increase, no change, or decrease) is generally preferred (i.e., produces the highest positive utility for all actors in the arena -- conflicting interests within one arena are not counted in this analysis).

• Possibility to export graphs as Pajek files.
• Possibility to indicate whether a factor represents a "stock" or a "rate" (System Dynamics terminology). The idea is that when simulating consecutive rounds, changes cumulate in stocks, not in flows. This feature is very much in a testing phase still!

• DANA finally complies fully with Bayesian logic. This has a price: when many uncertain links and/or prospects are defined, evaluation of a strategy becomes quite slow.
• More "natural" default utility vectors for goals.
By consequence, you may obtain different results when running analyses on old cases using the new DANA. See also the new features below!

• Custom goals: In the goal dialog you can now set any "face" for each of the 7 change levels by clicking on the face. LEFT mouse button increases the utility value (happier face), RIGHT mouse button decreases it (sadder face).
• Aggregated perceptions: Until now, DANA could not infer strategies for aggregated actors. Now it can! Label actors with tags and then use the Grouping dialog to define an actor group (e.g., all actors with a green tag) and select "aggregate by group". When you run the "Inferred strategies" analysis, DANA will first infer the "group perception" by merging the perceptions (including goals) of the "green" actors into a single perception graph, and then search for the strategy that maximises utility for the group of actors a a whole.
• You can tell DANA how to combine influences. When several links go into a factor, DANA used to always combine these using a (Bayesian) + operator. By default, this is still the case, but you now have the option to specify for a factor how it changes as a function of its "incoming" changes: ADD (= default), MULtiply, or take the MINimum or MAXimum of the incoming changes.

Bug fix: Error messages popping up during Multi-Criteria Analysis

Minor new feature: Easier way to rename factors. No need to switch to dictionary mode; instead, select a factor in a perception graph and press Ctrl-R (or select menu item Edit|Rename). The Rename-dialogue also allows you to change factors into attributes or actions and vice versa!

• better compliance with Bayesian logic: when factors are affected by multiple causal paths that share uncertain links, the uncertainty of these links no longes seen as "independent stochastic events"
• better memory management: DANA used to slowly but surely eat up memory resources; now most of the memory leaks have been fixed
• more transparent commenting: DANA now shows which object (actor, factor, causal link, ...) you are adding a comment to in the status bar at the bottom of the window
• interruptable analyses: just click on the newly added "cancel" button in the analyses toolbar
• graphic output of actor and arena level analyses: see similarity of perceptions, conflict, and resource dependency visualised as arrows between actors
• DANA now also saves the last analysis and group configuration settings
• more small things I forget...

Bug fixes as well as new features, some of which may (of course) contain new bugs...

• Some calculations in analyses (notably Conflict) were counterintuitive and have been improved.
• As analysts show a tendency to draw causal links from one action to another (to express "when A does X, then B will do Y"), this is now dealt with correctly when inferring strategies: actions with incoming arrows are no longer seen as "deliberate actions" and will appear as "no tactic" in inferred strategies. The same holds for actions that have been marked as prospects.
• A truly new feature (that justifies moving to version 1.1) is that DANA now supports a crude type of simulation, using the Analyst view as "reality" and creating new arenas to show actions and the resulting "state of reality" in subsequent rounds. This new feature will be documented some time in the future...