Supply Chain Engineering, 2nd Edition

Appendix A Multiple Criteria Decision Making: An Overview¹

Managers are frequently called upon to make decisions under multiple criteria that conflict with one another. For example, supply chain engineers have to consider conflicting criteria—supply chain costs, customer responsiveness, and supply chain risk, in making decisions. The general framework of a multiple criteria optimization problem is to simultaneously optimize several criteria, usually conflicting, subject to a system of constraints that define the feasible alternatives. Multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems are categorized on the basis of whether (i) the constraints are implicit, that is, the feasible alternatives are finite and known or (ii) the constraints are explicit, ...