Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Ease of implementation
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Cost
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Ease of modification/scalability/flexibility
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Employee morale
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Risk levels
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Cost savings
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Return on investment
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MCDM APPLICATIONS
In the international literature on management science and operations research
there is an increasing number of real-world applications of MCDM. Of course,
in the limited space here it would be impossible to provide an extensive
bibliography regarding these applications. However, it is possible to outline
some of the most significant areas to which MCDM has contributed. The
following list reports some of these areas:
1. Finance and economics
o Business failure prediction
o Credit risk assessment
o Portfolio selection and management
o Company mergers and acquisitions
o Financial planning
o Country risk evaluation
o Regional economic policy specification
2. Environmental Management and Energy planning
o Forest management
o Waste management
o Power plant siting
o Water resources planning
o Nuclear power management
o Energy intensity evaluation
3. Marketing
o Customer satisfaction
o Design of market penetration strategies
o Retail evaluation
4. Transportation
o Highway planning
o Subway design
5. Human resources management
o Job evaluation
o Personnel selection
6. Education
7. Agriculture
Extensive information on these applications can be found in the books of
Vincke, Pardalos et al., and Roy.
The complexity of real-world decisions and the plethora of factors and criteria
that are often involved necessitate the implementation of a sound theoretical
framework to structure and model the decision-making process. MCDM
provides such a framework, as well as a wide variety of sophisticated
methodological tools that are oriented towards the support of the decision
makers in facing real-world decision problems. This decision-support
orientation of MCDM, in combination with the focus given by researchers in
this field to develop advanced and realistic preference modeling techniques, is
its main distinguishing feature as opposed to statistical analysis and
optimization theory. The advances in the field continue rapidly. According to
Fishburn and Lavalle, they involve foundation aspects of MCDM such as the
interface between behavioral decision theory and prescriptive practice and the
underlying assumptions of MCDM methods, methodological aspects involving
the development of more effective methods, and implementation aspects