Tradeoffkelés

Tradeoffkelés is a structured decision-making process that focuses on the deliberate creation and management of trade-offs between competing objectives in complex design or policy problems. The term blends the English phrase trade-off with the Hungarian suffix -kelés, signaling a procedural approach or ongoing activity.

In practice, tradeoffkelés starts with clarifying objectives, constraints, and stakeholders, then generating alternative designs or policies. Each option is evaluated for how it balances factors such as cost, performance, reliability, safety, time-to-delivery, and social or environmental impact. Assessment often employs multi-criteria methods, scoring models, or visualization of trade-off curves to reveal the Pareto frontier and dependencies among criteria.

The process is iterative: preferences are elicited from stakeholders, options that seem sub-optimal under one view may reveal strengths under another future, and designs are refined to shift the balance in desirable directions. The aim is transparent, robust decisions that reflect values and risk tolerance rather than a single metric.

Applications include product development, software architecture, urban planning, energy systems, and public policy. Limitations include subjectivity in weighting, potential bias in data, the risk of oversimplifying interactions, and the need for adequate data and facilitation to maintain constructive deliberation.

Related concepts include multi-objective optimization, Pareto efficiency, and multi-criteria decision analysis. The term remains informal and context-dependent, used to describe a disciplined focus on trade-offs in design thinking.