Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is a process for making difficult and complicated decisions. These complex situations typically have more than one important objective that the decision maker needs to take into consideration.
For example, when choosing where to locate a new power plant, planners have to weigh the needs of safety by building the plant to withstand various natural disasters. At the same time, they have to make efforts to keep construction costs down so the plant will be cost-effective. These two objectives (or criteria), safety and cost, are both important and yet are at odds with each other: typically one is improved at the expense of the other.
MCDM provides a framework for taking many objectives into account simultaneously. The decision maker decides on the relative value of each objective (a subjective process, see below). These values, priorities, and preferences are quantified (transformed into numeric values), which allows mathematics to be used. When the MCDM process is completed, all the possible alternatives will be given a score and can be ranked in terms of how well they meet the decision maker's objectives.
It is important to note that there is no "right" answer for these types of problems. Each decision is unique, as are the values, priorities, and preferences of each decision maker. For example, in choosing which college to attend, "distance from home" is an important factor, but one student may prefer to be far away while another wants to stay close. These perspectives will be built into the mathematical model of the decision created by MCDM.
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It's not exactly relevant to this section, but here's some more information on Operations Research:
http://hsor.org/
Here's some information specific to Project MINDSET:
http://www.mindsetproject.org/index.php/aboutus
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