Towards Agricultural Water Management Decisions in the Context of WELF Nexus

A Multi-criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) framework based on the combination of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAVT/MAUT) with the Weights Assessment through Prioritization method (WAP) is proposed for decision problems related to agricultural water management in the context of water-energy-land-food (WELF) nexus. The implementation of the framework supports a Decision Maker (DM) to quantify his/her preferences in a structured and rational way, in order to select the best alternative for agricultural water management. Through the use of the Multicriteria Interactive Intelligence Decision Aiding System (MIIDAS), marginal utilities functions for all the criteria are constructed. The criteria are grouped in points of view, which may refer to individual nexus elements and costs for investments or agricultural inputs. The WAP software assists the DM to assess the relative importance of the criteria and estimate their weights

Waste Classification of Spent Refractory Materials to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals Exploiting Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding Approach

The recycling of used refractory materials in the heavy industry constitutes one of the significant environmental problems in the industry related to environmental and financial issues. This study proposes a multicriteria methodological frame to characterize the refractory material waste and identify the recycling capabilities. Considering the chemical and physical analysis of the refractory material wastes, the proposed methodological frame progresses into a two-phase procedure. The first phase includes an on/off approach that allows discretizing the refractory material wastes to compatible or not compatible as far as their recycling prospects. Then, an additive value model is utilized, including (a) the marginal value functions used for every criterion related to critical environmental factors, and (b) the weight vector reflecting the relative importance of the criteria used. A group of experts concerning the environment and the refractory materials was employed to estimate the additive value model. The assessment of the marginal value function is achieved using the module of the Multicriteria Interactive Intelligence Decision Aiding System (MIIDAS), which is based on a modification of the mid-value split point technique incorporating focused dialogues, artificial intelligence, and visual techniques. The weight vector was assessed using the weight assessment through prioritization method (WAP), which concludes with the estimation of the weights based on the criteria ranking and the pairwise expression of the strength of preferences for the consecutive criteria according to their ranking. The outcome of this approach is to introduce an environmental appropriateness index for refractory materials based on their chemical composition and the judgement of an expert group. The main findings of this research may be useful for engineers, decision-makers, and scientists in the field of circular economy and waste management

PRAKSAGORAS: A group decision support system for the improvement of the health care services

Summarization: One of the main characteristics of the health sector is that consumes a large proportion of GDP across the European Union. For this reason in our days the health care policy makers use advanced models in order to evaluate the health care services and more over to redesign them in order to improve their effectiveness. Studying the academic literature it’s obvious that the majority of the models that have been developed for the improvement of the health care services don’t take into account the opinions of the citizens. Another limitation is that the majority of the methodologies take into account only the preference model of one decision maker. Some recent research approaches in order to tackle the aforementioned problem use satisfaction questionnaires in order to enable the citizens in the area of reorganization of the health care services. Praksagoras is a Group Decision Support System that has been developed in order to redesign the health care services and moreover to improve the decision making process by enabling many decision makers like CEO of the hospital, the Physicians and the patients. Praksagoras combines simulations, Multicriteria satisfaction analysis, social choice theory and the aggregation disaggregation approach of Multi-criteria analysis. More specifically, via the simulation model the system depicts the current operation of the emergency departments. The modeler has the ability to test alternatives scenarios for the emergency department in order to test the impacts of these alternatives scenarios on consistent set of criteria such as waiting times, length of stay, working load of the personnel and bed usage. The MUSA model reveals the weak points of the services giving the opportunity to the analyst to develop alternatives that are based on patients’ needs. In order to enable many stakeholders (doctors, patients etc.) in the decision making process we use the RACES approach. Races approach incorporates the social choice functions for aggregating individual rankings with MINORA and MIIDAS systems, in order to assess value function(s), as compatible as possible with a collective ranking. The main aim of this approach is to provide mechanisms for the support of the analysis of the individual and collective preference models and to enrich the knowledge of the decision problem and the structure of DM's preferences.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 26th National Conference on Operational Researc