Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
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Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), or Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), is a discipline aimed at supporting decision makers who are faced with making numerous and conflicting evaluations. MCDA aims at highlighting these conflicts and deriving a way to come to a compromise in a transparent process. For example, the European Parliament may apply MCDA to help assess whether the introduction of software patents in Europe would help or destroy the European software industry. [1]. Since MCDA involves a certain element of subjectiveness, the morals and ethics of the researcher implementing MCDA play a significant part in the accuracy and fairness of MCDA's conclusions. The ethical point is very important when one is making a decision that seriously impacts on other people, as opposed to a personal decision. Some of the MCDA methods are:
- Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
- Multi-Attribute Global Inference of Quality (MAGIQ)
- Goal Programming
- ELECTRE (Outranking)
- PROMETHÉE (Outranking)
- Data Envelopment Analysis
The choice of which model is most appropriate depends on the problem at hand and may be to some extent dependent on which model the decision maker is most comfortable with.
The New Approach to Appraisal (NATA), which is a framework used to appraise transport projects and proposals in the United Kingdom, is a major practical application of an MCDA-based approach to support Government decision making. Other applications of MCDA approaches used by the UK Government are set out in its own MCDA manual.
