Making Better Decisions with MCDA

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As humans, we weigh and analyze conflicting inputs and make thousands of decisions that affect our everyday lives and, very often, these decisions involve evaluating two or more contributing, possibly contradicting, factors. The corporate world, government organizations, and medical centers also have to face complicated problems that are embedded with multiple conflicting issues and numerous outcome possibilities in order to choose feasible solutions. Multicriteria decision analysis $($MCDA$)$ is one approach that is used to help organizations consider alternative courses of action and prioritize project alternatives before arriving at an acceptable solution. MCDA is particularly useful when a wide range of stakeholders are involved, each having conflicting interests, values, and goals.

MCDA can be used in any discipline and for any business to help resolve a wide range of problems where multiple solutions are possible. For example, MCDA has been used in health care to improve patient care and for disease treatments, for customers trying to make a new purchase such as a new car, and for tourists planning their itinerary of activities. MCDA has also been used for transportation issues, energy usage concerns, water resources management, fisheries management, risk assessment, land use, site selection, and nuclear emergency management. Popular MCDA software that supports complex decision$-$making situations that have multiple and often conflicting objectives that stakeholders or decision makers value differently includes $1000$ minds, M$-$MACBETH, Socio Technical Allocation of Resources $($STAR$),$ Strategic Multi$-$Attribute Ranking Tool $($SMART$),$ Visual PROMETHEE, and EVIDEM.