Chapter 11 – Multi-Criteria Decision-Making
Learning Objectives
- Understanding Multi-attribute Decision Making
- Applying an approach to solve the Multiple Attribute Problem
- Understanding sensitivity testing
- Understanding decision making under uncertainty
Multi-Atrubute (MAU) decision making is one of the most widely used decision methods in different fields of applications such as water, land, and forest management, energy production, project management and environmental protection. It is also widely used in many areas of decision and policy making, as well as a tool for program evaluation. MAU is an effective tool used to solve complex and conflicting decision problems that involve discrete and mutually exclusive alternatives. In other words, MAU is most useful when we have distinct and separate (discrete) alternatives that cannot be combined in a harmonized solution. Choosing a new cell phone is a good example of these kind of decisions; it is possible to clearly distinguish among all your alternatives, alternatives cannot be combined, and choosing one of them will automatically exclude all other alternatives. MAU is suitable for selection of a limited number of alternatives and preference ranking. The evaluation is based on predetermined alternatives and data describing how well each of these alternatives meet important goals for the decision maker, which are commonly called criteria or attributes. When choosing a cell phone, different brands and models constitute the major potential alternatives, and price, color, camera resolution, or system compatibility are examples of important goals or criteria.
There are many approaches to MAU, and in this chapter, you will learn one of those approaches that is intuitive and useful for many decision problems. The chapter starts with a brief examle that we then extend to cover all the basics of MAU modeling.
Attribution
By Luis F. Luna-Reyes, Erika Martin amd Mikhail Ivonchyk, and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
