Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
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Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), or Multi Criteria Decision Making, is a procedure aimed at supporting decision maker(s) whose problem involves 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, European Parliament may apply MCDA to arrive on a number of conclusions on whether introducing software patents in Europe would help or destroy European software industry. [1]. Since MCDA involves a certain element of subjectiveness, morals and ethics of the researcher implementing MCDA plays a significant part on accuracy and fairness of MCDA's conclusion. The ethical point is very important when one is making a decision that seriously impact on other people as opposed to a personal decision. Some of the MCDA models are:-
- Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
- Multi-Attribute Global Inference of Quality (MAGIQ)
- Goal Programming
- ELECTRE (Outranking)
- Data Envelopment Analysis
Which model is most appropriate depends on the problem at hand and may be to some extent which model decision maker is most comfortable with.
