DEXi Development

DEXi has been developed in collaboration with the:

The initial development was financially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia within the Ro (Computer Literacy) Programme (1999-2000).

The development of DEXi started in 1999. The motivation was twofold. First, it was conceived as a successor to DEX, a very successful program for multi-attribute modeling. Until 1999, DEX had been used in several tens of real-life decision situations (see publications on the DEX web page). However, as a MS-DOS program, DEX was becoming outdated and less convenient for its users. Second, in that time in Slovenia, the DEX methodology was taught in several university courses, and there were initiatives to introduce it into secondary schools as well. Thus, there was a strong need for a simple computer program to be used in decision-modeling courses in secondary schools and universities.

Consequently, DEXi's design is a trade-off between these two requirements. It has a convenient MS Windows user interface, which has been kept as simple as possible. Some advanced DEX features have been deliberately dropped, such as: probability and fuzzy distributions of values, chain attributes, advanced transformations of utility functions, some settings and reports. In order to deal with missing, incomplete or uncertain data, DEXi employs value sets instead of more complex DEX's value distributions. On the other hand, more emphasis has been put on graphical and reporting capabilities in DEXi. Also, DEXi adds a new functionality for the treatment of attribute weights.

In subsequent years, DEXi was increasingly used not only in education, but also in more and more advanced decision-support projects. Some extremely complex decision models were developed in international projects, proving - somewhat surprisingly - that DEXi is suitable not only for education, but also for supporting difficult real-life decision problems. Inevitably, in order to address these requirements, DEXi was gradually upgraded with new advanced features, such as new methods for option analysis, import/export features and undo/redo functionality.

Versions

DEXi version 1.00 was released in 2000, with Slovenian user interface only.

DEXi versions 1.01 through 1.04 were gradually released in the period 2001-2006. They addressed only bug fixes and the addition of Slovenian help. There were no major functional additions or improvements.

DEXi version 2.00 was released in 2007, introducing a number of additions and improvements:

DEXi version 3.00 was released in 2008:

DEXi version 3.01 was released in May 2009:

DEXi version 3.02 was released in October 2009:

DEXi version 3.03 was released in March 2011:

DEXi version 3.04 was released in December 2012:

DEXi version 4.00 was released in July 2013:

DEXi version 4.01 was released in November 2014:

DEXi version 5.00 was released in July 2015:

DEXi version 5.01 was released in November 2015:

DEXi version 5.02 was released in February 2016:

DEXi version 5.03 was gradually developed 2018-19 and not released to public:

DEXi version 5.04 was released in April 2020: DEXi version 5.05 was released in May 2021:

Credits

Marko Bohanec: design and programming, documentation, English help, Web pages
Vladislav Rajkovič: initial design and management, educational aspects
Eva Jereb: Slovenian help
Uroš Rajkovič: English translation of version 1.02
Zarja Vintar: DEXi logo

Acknowledgements

Jordan Russell, http://www.jrsoftware.org/, Inno Setup
AHA-SOFT, http://www.aha-soft.com/, some application icons
Steema TeeChart for VCL/FMX, http://www.steema.com/teechart/vcl