Whether managing strategy, operations or products, knowing how to make the best decision in a complex, uncertain business environment is difficult. You might be faced with multiple, competing objectives, which means making trade-offs. To complicate matters, any uncertainty makes it hard to explicitly understand how different objectives will impact potential outcomes. This book will help you face these problems. It provides a decision analysis framework implemented as a simple spreadsheet tool. This multi-objective decision analysis framework helps you to measure trade-offs among objectives and incorporate uncertainties and risk preferences. With this book, you will be able to identify what information is needed to make a decision, define how that information should be combined, and, finally, provide quantifiable evidence to clearly communicate and justify the decision. The process involves minimal overhead and is perfect for busy professionals who need a simple, structured process for making, tracking, and communicating decisions. This process makes decision making more efficient by focusing only on information and factors that are well-defined, measureable, and relevant to the decision at hand. The framework requires clear characterization of a decision, ensuring that it can be traced and is consistent with the intended objectives and organizational values. Using this structured decision-making framework, anyone can consistently make better decisions to gain competitive and strategic advantage.

Decision making is the process of selecting a possible course of action from all the available alternatives. In almost all such problems the multiplicity of criteria for judging the alternatives is pervasive. That is, for many such problems, the decision maker (OM) wants to attain more than one objective or goal in selecting the course of action while satisfying the constraints dictated by environment, processes, and resources. Another characteristic of these problems is that the objectives are apparently non commensurable. Mathematically, these problems can be represented as: (1. 1 ) subject to: gi(~) ~ 0, ,', . . . ,. ! where ~ is an n dimensional decision variable vector. The problem consists of n decision variables, m constraints and k objectives. Any or all of the functions may be nonlinear. In literature this problem is often referred to as a vector maximum problem (VMP). Traditionally there are two approaches for solving the VMP. One of them is to optimize one of the objectives while appending the other objectives to a constraint set so that the optimal solution would satisfy these objectives at least up to a predetermined level. The problem is given as: Max f. ~) 1 (1. 2) subject to: where at is any acceptable predetermined level for objective t. The other approach is to optimize a super-objective function created by multiplying each 2 objective function with a suitable weight and then by adding them together.

This book describes how a confused decision maker, who wishes to make a reasonable and responsible choice among alternatives, can systematically probe their thoughts and feelings in order to make the critically important trade-offs between incommensurable objectives.

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Multi-objective programming (MOP) can simultaneously optimize multi-objectives in mathematical programming models, but the optimization of multi-objectives triggers the issue of Pareto solutions and complicates the derived answers. To address these problems, researchers often incorporate the concepts of fuzzy sets and evolutionary algorithms into M

Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Supporting the Selection of Engineering Materials in Product Design, Second Edition, provides readers with tactics they can use to optimally select materials to satisfy complex design problems when they are faced with the vast range of materials available. Current approaches to materials selection range from the use of intuition and experience, to more formalized computer-based methods, such as electronic databases with search engines to facilitate the materials selection process. Recently, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have been applied to materials selection, demonstrating significant capability for tackling complex design problems. This book describes the rapidly growing field of MCDM and its application to materials selection. It aids readers in producing successful designs by improving the decision-making process. This new edition updates and expands previous key topics, including new chapters on materials selection in the context of design problem-solving and multiple objective decision-making, also presenting a significant amount of additional case studies that will aid in the learning process. - Describes the advantages of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in the materials selection process through different case studies - Presents a methodology for multi-objective material design optimization that employs Design of Experiments coupled with Finite Element Analysis - Supplements existing quantitative methods of materials selection by allowing simultaneous consideration of design attributes, component configurations, and types of material - Provides a case study for simultaneous materials selection and geometrical optimization processes

This book proposes a set of models to describe fuzzy multi-objective decision making (MODM), fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), fuzzy group decision making (GDM) and fuzzy multi-objective group decision-making problems, respectively. It also gives a set of related methods (including algorithms) to solve these problems. One distinguishing feature of this book is that it provides two decision support systems software for readers to apply these proposed methods. A set of real-world applications and some new directions in this area are then described to further instruct readers how to use these methods and software in their practice.