MCDS methods in strategic planning- alternatives for AHP

1. MCDS methods in strategic planning- alternatives for AHP Annika Kangas & Jyrki Kangas Saariselkä 19.-21.4.2001

2. Ecological information • Ecological / recreational information often has low quality • risk of ditch maintenance or clearcutting to watercourse • wildlife population viability Need for methods that deal with low quality information and uncertainty

3. Public participation • Public participation (e.g.in State forests) involves a large number of participants • Group decision making involves several DMs  high costs and poor availability of information Need for methods that have low information requirements and enable cheap preference elicition

4. Multicriteria approval • Based on approval voting • instead of several voters several criteria considered • Information requirements • criteria ranked according to importance • acceptability of alternatives with respect to each criteria, for example • above average  acceptable • below average  not acceptable

5. Usability • Could be used for public participation • post or internet inquiries • Criteria values measured in ratio or interval scale are downscaled to ordinal scale  information is lost

6. Outranking • Ordinal, interval and ratio scale information can be used • information transformed to pseudo-criteria • uncertainty dealt with pseudo-criteria thresholds • Weights of criteria interpreted as votes • If intensities of preferences are known, information may be lost

7. Public participation example • In State owned forests public participation obligatory • Case study • four participants: FPS, regional group, local group and public • four main criteria: FPS’s business revenues, socio-economic values, recreational values and conservational values, measured with 17 variables • six strategies

8. Decision hierarchy

9. Observed rankings

10. Group decision making example • Jointly owned forests problem in forest management • all owners need to approve management actions • Case study • three owners with equal share • 20 forest plans • six criteria: net incomes, value of the forest, landscape beauty, blueberry yield, capercaillie viability and biodiversity

11. Observed rankings

12. Requirements • Methods that utilise both low and high quality information • forest information fairly accurate when compared to ecological criteria • all information in use, nothing wasted • Uncertainty dealt with explicitly • Distributions of uncertain criterion values and / or criterion weights

13. SMAA - a possibility • Stochastic multicriteria acceptance analysis • what kind of preferences support any one alternative • Weight information can be exact, partial or nonexistent • Criterion values • uncertain cardinal values from distribution • ordinal values converted to cardinal using simulation