Multi crteria decision making and its applications : a literature review

This paper presents current techniques used in Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and their applications. Two basic approaches for MCDM, namely Artificial Intelligence MCDM (AIMCDM) and Classical MCDM (CMCDM) are discussed and investigated. Recent articles from international journals related to MCDM are collected and analyzed to find which approach is more common than the other in MCDM. Also, which area these techniques are applied to. Those articles are appearing in journals for the year 2008 only. This paper provides evidence that currently, both AIMCDM and CMCDM are equally common in MCDM

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Short Software Descriptions

This paper briefly presents the software for interactive decision support that was developed in 1990-1991 within the Contracted Study Agreement between the System and Decision Sciences Program at IIASA and several Polish scientific institutions, namely: Institute of Automatic Control (Warsaw University of Technology); Institute of Computing Science (Technical University of Poznaii); Institute of Informatics (Warsaw University); and Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. This Contracted Study Agreement has been a continuation of the same type of activity conducted since 1985. Therefore many of the software packages are actually improved versions of the programs developed in 1985-1989. The theoretical part of the results developed within this scientific activity is presented in the IIASA Collaborative Paper CP-90-008 by A. Ruszczynski, T. Rogowski and A.P. Wierzbicki entitled "Contributions to Methodology and Techniques of Decision Analysis (First Stage)." Detailed descriptions of the methodology and the user guide for each particular software package are published in separate Collaborative Papers. Each software package described here is available in executable form for non-profit educational and scientific purposes, however, any profit-oriented or commercial application requires a written agreement with IIASA. Inquires about the software should be directed to the System and Decision Sciences Program at IIASA, Methodology of Decisions Analysis Project