In today’s globalized world, citizens and customers are being increasingly informed and demanding, and decisions are no longer based solely on cost or any other single criterion. Organizations face the challenge of making strategic, tactical and operational decisions that require a comprehensive analysis of stakeholders and their interests. The decisions must also incorporate many aspects of technical, social, economic/ financial, safety-based or environmental character. This is precisely where the principles and concepts of Multiple Criteria Decision Making/ Aiding (MCDM/A) become crucial and necessary.

This course will provide a theoretical foundation of Multi-Criteria Decision Making/Aiding (MCDM/A) as well as the practical application of its principles and ideas to solve complex decision problems in which many, often contradictory, points of view must be considered. Throughout the course, MCDM/A will be presented as a well-established and rapidly evolving methodology and a set of methods that enable decision-makers (DM-s) to better understand and structure the decision problems and make more rational and better-justified decisions.

MCDM/A has been successfully applied across a wide range of sectors, including logistics and supply chain management, manufacturing operations, energy systems control, environmental protection and natural resource management, infrastructure design and fixed assets management, healthcare and medical services management, banking and financial services management, tourism and transportation, human resource management, and many others. Selected examples of these applications will be demonstrated during the course.

Throughout the course, participants will learn how to solve MULTIPLE CRITERIA DECISION PROBLEMS and understand their major categories. They will master their capabilities and skills to diagnose and analyze complex systems and processes, discover and recognize the decision problems arising in them, design and generate solutions, model and structure the decision problem, define and model the DM’s and stakeholders expectations and preferences, and conduct computational experiments to evaluate alternatives/ variants/ solutions and search effectively for a sustainable, and compromise solutions that balance the interests of different stakeholders and satisfy the trade-offs between criteria. All major phases of the solution procedure of the Multiple Criteria Decision Problem will be demonstrated during the course.

Important: If you are a regular undergraduate or graduate student at Universidad de los Andes, you will not be able to register for courses with academic credits through Continuing Education. This registration must be done directly with the Faculty offering the course of interest.