Interactive Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Production Economics

Decisions regarding Production Economics usually involve multiple objectives, such as minimisation of cost, resources, inactive time or maximisation of product quality, utilisation of fixed resources and customer service. Neglect of this problem characteristic may lead to ad hoc policies and inefficient decision-making. By advancing theory and applications, this dissertation strongly supports the concept of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) for applied industrial decisions in planning and operation. The common theme is interactive MCDM, which is argued as closer to human decision-making and, in this context, claimed to be methodologically superior to methods based on preference assessment. Of the two parts in the dissertation, the first being theoretically oriented includes the compilation, description and investigation of an interactive method, IDEM, quantitatively characterising the method in terms of completeness and constructiveness. The MCDM methodology is extended with a characterisation and formalisation of a new conflict-based redundancy concept. The applied part of the dissertation focuses at decisions of frequent managerial interest: engineering design, planning of complex dynamic rptems and operational production planning. The strength of MCDM for Production Planning is illustrated by revisiting a classical inventory model and proposing an interactive MCDM model with computational and behavioural advantages. The work devoted to engineering design and concurrent engineering describe a formalisation of the decision process close to observed practice, but with decision support for variant design and interaction between functional areas. IDEM is used as a backbone in a decision model with outlined connections to tools as CAD, CAE and CAM. The design and analysis of prohibitively complex dynamic systems have so far primarily been subject to simulation techniques. Contributions are made to this area in terms of an interactive structured methodology, hybrid between MCDM and simulation. The underlying idea is to enable the decision-maker to work in criterion space and interactively explore the complex system. The practical usefulness of the interactive methodology is demonstrated in the final paper on multi-criteria decision modelling in reservoir management, applied to thermoelectric power generation. The release decision for a reservoir with downstream thermoelectric power plants is modelled and exemplified with the case of the Shellmouth Reservoir in Manitoba, Canada. The MCDM approach used in this context is the Interactive Weighted Tchebycheff Procedure in combination with decision maker-supplied bounds and enhanced communication