An Application of ELECTRE Tri to Support Innovation

In relation to the economic crisis, the airports were pressed from their national civil aviation authorities and from the market to lower their costs and improve their capability in organizing the supply of public facilities. Some airports reacted to this situation improving their efficiency in invoicing and collecting user charges. An enterprise that supplies different services to the Italian Aviation Authority and to several Italian companies who are airport concessionaires decided to analyse the Italian airport revenues from off-flight services, in order to compare their different results and help them improve their product offerings and identify new products’ value drivers. To meet this requirement, an outranking method, ELECTRE Tri, was used to evaluate the marginal and overall activation of each Italian airport in reacting to the crisis and making profit by organizing public facilities and services that are different from the classic air navigation services on the ground. The choice of the method and the adopted procedure were motivated by the difficulties in reliable data acquisition, comparison of different and almost incomparable situations and preference elicitation, without the involvement of the actual decision makers and, in relation to a sequence of model versions, different in terms of problem structuring and parameters definition. A collaborative procedure of model structuring and incremental result analysis and several ELECTRE Tri applications, assigning each airport to a specific category, were oriented to the generation of a ‘robust’ model and a clear result, to read and synthesize all the information elements, understand the situation and acquire a shared vision of the problem, orient the process of information acquisition and support the definition of some improving actions

A decision support system in order to facilitate new financing actions in the public sector

This analytical in-depth study on the financing modalities adopted in the Region of Piedmont was carried out with the contribution of those directly involved in the decision-making process enabling to acquire, codify and organize important elements of information which can be used to increase the evaluation culture in the Region. Owing to an increased interest in making public financing actions more efficient, the results of this analysis are of particular interest as they can be used as a multi-criteria evaluation model and a decision support system aimed at facilitating and implementing new financing and monitoring actions in a context of organizational learning

Designing major appliances: A decision support model

Although competitors from low-cost countries are pushing manufacturers to lowering prices and replace the production at the expense of quality, the definition of new scenarios through research and development seems the best way to succeed. This paper seeks to explain why companies should invest in the redesign of household appliances when there is a potential improvement in the sustainability of the product. This work considers home appliances investigating their disassembly, the updating of components and the management of end of life, combined with their connectivity and the communication with the final user. This research develops a multi-criteria model to select among the major appliances the most suitable to redesign, providing a ranking of alternatives. The analysis is based on the potential improvement on eco-design of products, determined on eight relevant criteria about sustainability and relationship between users and appliances. This study attempts to prove that business models based on Multi Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) methodology, combined with two design approaches to sustainability, are able to move from linear to circular economy. Waste management and product refurbishment - through Design by Components focused on product maintenance and replacement of its parts - are, in fact, key aspects to achieve valuable results. The paper proposes an analysis of this decision process, synthesizing the most critical aspects and the result of a Multi Criteria Decision Aid intervention

A system to integrate unstructured and semistructured information resources: an application in an innovation design process

A system that integrates different tools, from multicriteria analysis and mathematical programming but also cognitive and social psychology, can be proposed to cope with complexities and uncertainties that generate criticality in the socio technical approach. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potentialities of this system, above all in terms of information fusion and use in various contexts, and to propose an application in relation to an industrial project, in order to support the conceptual phase of the design processr

ELECTRE III as a support for waste incineration participatory decision making

Locating an incinerator and a facility to store ashes and other wastes is a long and complex process in Italy. The District of Turin faced this situation by choosing a participative approach to the problem and by using Multi-criteria Analysis as a support for a specific phase of this decision process. A group of forty five decision makers (local authorities and representatives from the different communities that were involved) worked together for sixteen months, with a facilitator group, to identify the criteria which are judged relevant to analyse the consequences of the location of a plant. Two multi-criteria models, one for an incinerator and the other for a waste disposal plant, were elaborated and an ELECTRE method was used to compare sites and rank them, with the aim of selecting the best sites to activate an Environmental Impact Assessment procedure. A team made up of analysts from different organisations supported this work from a technical point of view. This paper proposes an analysis of this participatory decision process and synthesises the difficulties and results of the multi-criteria decision aid interventio