Danielle C. Morais

• Federal University of Pernambuco

Waste sorting is a core element for adding value to the recycling chain. Exploring and prioritizing alternatives regarding its expansion and improvement is very challenging. This study proposes a multi-methodological approach through the integration of a Problem Structuring Method (PSM) and a multicriteria method (MCDA/M) to support decision-making...

ELECTRE TRI-C is a method for sorting problems with imprecise evaluations and stable criteria weights, typically for a single decision-maker. While some extensions have addressed uncertain criteria weights and outranking functions using hesitant fuzzy sets (HFS) and interval type 2 trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (IT2TrfN), there is a gap in handling sit...

The Global Health Security Index (GHSI) categorizes countries according to a composite score. It is proposed as a means to alert governments and health institutions about the gaps of national health systems to compromise with the detection and management of biological threats. Recently, several criticisms have been addressed to the scoring, ranking...

Clustering nations by using sustainability indexes has been proposed as a means to support decision-making in politics, academia and business. This starts by computing indexes that describe the social, economic and environmental progress of countries, and continues by ranking nations and clustering countries that face similar sustainability challen...

The existence and operation of dumps is still a problem faced by many cities in Brazil. The deadline for closing all dumps, established by the National Solid Waste Policy expired in 2014, but many municipalities continue to act in disagreement to what the Law requires. The operation of dumps has a number of environmental, social and economic conseq...

A existência de lixões ainda é um problema enfrentado por diversas cidades do Brasil. Por lei, todos os lixões do país deveriam ter sido fechados até 2014, prazo dado pela Política Nacional dos Resíduos Sólidos, entretanto, isso não foi suficiente para proporcionar a erradicação dos lixões. O funcionamento dos lixões trás uma série de consequências...

Lixões são uma indesejável realidade no Brasil. A Lei que institui a Política Nacional de Resíduos Sólidos, estabelecia que até 2014 todos os lixões fossem fechados. Entretanto, milhares ainda estão presentes em todas as regiões do país. A existência e o funcionamento de lixões trazem consigo consequências ambientais, sociais e econômicas para a so...

A existência de lixões ainda é um problema enfrentado por diversas cidades do Brasil. Por lei, todos os lixões do país deveriam ter sido fechados até 2014, prazo dado pela Política Nacional dos Resíduos Sólidos, entretanto, isso não foi suficiente para proporcionar a erradicação dos lixões. O funcionamento dos lixões trás uma série de consequências...

Traditional techniques to evaluate the efficiency to innovate of economic sectors face two difficulties: heterogeneous sectors, and uncertain and imprecise information. In this article, a methodology is proposed to deal with these conditions in a set of Brazilian economic sectors. Heterogeneity is addressed through a multicriteria sorting technique...

The Tradeoff Elicitation Procedure is a Multi-Criteria Decision Making/Aiding method which is responsible for eliciting scaling constants and presents a robust axiomatic structure. As to its axiomatic structure, this procedure requires the decision-maker to identify the exact indifference point which induces a large number of inconsistencies in the...

Group decision making (GDM) is a very important process to reach a collective solution with a certain level of consensus. When a collective solution is generated by the aggregation of individual solutions, the group members can feel some disagreements with the collective solution. The GDM process proposed in this paper is a framework that supports...

Water scarcity is a persistent problem in diverse regions of the world. This study focuses on the extreme scarcity of water affecting La Paz, a municipality in the west of Bolivia. The intense drought of the last few decades and the inadequate management of water utilities have impacted several factors. Within this context, this study identified th...

In a water distribution system, maintenance is an essential pillar to ensure that an efficient service is provided and to combat problems such as real water losses. Managing such a system’s maintenance needs involves multiple stakeholders, subjective variables, and requires a learning process to find a solution. Structuring the problem can provide...

When exploiting groundwater, it is common to have problems with wells since maintenance activities can interrupt not only the production of water but also its distribution. Planning maintenance activities is a challenge that involves multiple agents, several criteria, and subjective variables. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision model based o...

Problem structuring methods (PSMs) are a family of methods developed to support the process of group decision making, allowing stakeholders to understand a problem and commit to a consequent action. PSMs allow for the representation of a problem in a cognitively understandable way for participants. An experiment was conducted in four classrooms at...

Abstract Group decision models that contemplate the particularities of the decision-making process help organizations pursue their strategic objectives. In the financial market, the primary interest of organizations consists in ensuring financial returns, which guarantee stability for the organization. This study identifies major problems in the cu...

ELECTRE TRI, a family of multi-criteria methods used to sort alternatives into preference-ordered categories, defines an outranking function to measure the membership degree of an alternative to a category, whenever imprecise evaluations are available. Recent extensions use Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (HFS) to consider uncertain evaluations. However, deter...

Water supply systems in urban areas may become deficient due to increasing demand, which accompanies population growth but is further jeopardized by equipment aging and problems related to maintenance management. Moreover, operating the system involves a large number of issues that a decision-maker must address simultaneously. Therefore, the use of...

Our focus is on the decision process. A Framework for the DPVP (decision process for choosing a voting procedure) is necessary in order to guide how best to aid DMs. It is assumed that DMs may evaluate the impact of VP (Voting Procedure) properties on their own business decision process. It is assumed that the DMs have agreed on some voting procedu...

We continue the discussion on rule choices in dichotomous settings. An argument for the simple majority principle is built by assuming that each ballot configuration is equally likely. In a situation where just three voters are present it turns out that the probability of each voter being on the winning side is maximized when the simple majority ru...

This chapter deals with the concept of manipulation, understood as preference misrepresentation, in the light of the main theoretical results focusing on their practical significance (This chapter is largely based on Nurmi (Transactions on computational collective intelligence XXIII. Springer, Berlin, pp. 149–161, 2016)). Manipulability is a pervas...

The theory of voting often takes the agenda as exogenously given. The deliberative view of democratic decision making focuses on phases of decision process preceding the actual voting, occasionally even replacing the latter with deliberative processes. We discuss the plausibility of presuming that the best argument wins. We also take up issues pert...

There is a distinction between using rules in the business context and in the political context. Furthermore, in the political context, another distinction is between using rules to select people and using rules to follow procedures. Usually an analyst chooses a Voting Procedure (VP), based on his/her knowledge with regard to the technical issues t...

While most social choice results pertain to ranking environments where the individuals submit their preference relations (and these only) to the balloting procedure, there are procedures that require a slightly different kind of input from the voters. We discuss two such systems: the majority judgment and the range voting. These are relatively rece...

All societies have rules. Some are explicitly based on them, but in general rules take on many forms. They can strict and formal or ambiguous and informal or something between these extremes. Many rules have a clear-cut motivation. Some pertain to coordination such as the traffic rules. Some have the aim of avoiding collectively irrational or harmf...

What if the decision makers have different degrees of expertise and the aim is to maximize the probability of a correct decision? (The first three sub-sections are largely based on Nurmi, Voting procedures under uncertainty. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg, pp 49–59, 2002) This possibility has been considered for a long time. We shall describe the main...

Most decision problems have multiple objectives. The basic ingredients of these problems need to be identified in order to build decision models. There are many MCDM/A (Multi-Criteria Decision Making/Aiding) methods and multi-objective approaches. This chapter places an emphasis on the MCDM/A methods, which are more closely related to rules for mak...

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are tools that are being increasingly used in group decision-making processes. In this context, GRUS (GRoUp Support System) is a web-based system to support group decision processes which consider the individual preferences of different actors involved in the same problem. The system supports a multicriteria ap...

The management of water resources involves multiple decision-makers, each with their own perspectives on the way the decision problem should be tackled. This Chapter presents an illustration of the framework for choosing a VP for a water resources management problem. The application is based on the Morais and de Almeida (Omega (Oxford) 40:42–52, 20...

We introduce and discuss the most common voting procedures. Our starting point is the observation that voting rules can make a significant difference in the voting outcomes. First we deal with the ambiguity of the notion of majority outcome in cases involving more than two alternatives or candidates. The concepts of Condorcet winner and core are in...

This Chapter presents an illustration of the framework for choosing a voting procedure applied to the context of assessing the Readiness of Technology for Generating Energy. The illustration is based on Morais et al. (Math Probl Eng (Online), 1–11, 2015) and is used in order to prioritize technologies that are critical for power generation in the E...

We discuss the problem of selecting a decision rule in the simplest possible setting involving dichotomous choice situations. The starting point is individual utility maximization under two types of cost-constraints: one resulting from the collectivity making decisions against the interests of the generic individual and the other associated with re...

By way of summarizing our account on collective decision procedures, we shall provide a brief exposition of those methods that have been discussed in earlier chapters from the viewpoint of their applicability. The question we seek to answer is: what are the circumstances under which each system works best? Since each system has specific proprieties...

Among other worldwide concerns is that of choosing the technology for generating electric power that should comprise the electricity matrix of a country. In this kind of decision process, multiple actors are involved, and they need to consider not just the financial dimension but also the technical, socio-economic and environmental dimensions. This...

There are quite a few voting procedures applied for what appears to be a common purpose, viz. to tease out the will of the voters. Despite hundreds of years of study there is no consensus in the scholarly community as to which is the best procedure. The criteria emphasized by different scholars differ to some extent and it turns out that none of th...

A referendum paradox occurs when a collective decision by a majority in a representative body contradicts the majority opinion in the electorate at large. We discuss this paradox as an introduction to the problems of constructing optimally representative committees. Two important studies are reviewed and the notion of a Condorcet committee introduc...

Sometimes the members of the committee or small group are more interested in avoiding particular outcomes than in reaching their own favourite ones. In such circumstances the sequential voting by veto provides an a priori plausible decision making method. We outline the method and discuss its main properties.

Negotiation Support Systems are used to exchange offers and to improve the negotiation process. Some methods are based on perspectives like heuristics in order to bring the negotiation protocol gradually closer to reality. These approaches can be important in real negotiation as they can help to improve skillsespecially in distributive bargaining....

A decision support system (DSS) was conceptually developed to support the decision maker (DM) in classify the activities into core and non-core competencies, and to establish their outsourcing relationship. This DSS is recommended because companies have seen the outsourcing as an alternative for business survival in a competitive market. Thus, for...

To perform maintenance, the prioritization of sectors on power distribution networks still has been a challenge for managers and maintenance engineers. It should consider relevant aspects of the sectors, such as population density, the number of hospitals, and the number of schools, among others. In order to guarantee facilities reliability, this p...

Selection processes in civil engineering infrastructure projects might require more time and effort than the decisionmakers involved in these projects are normally prepared to devote to running them. A novel approach is proposed to sort these activities into classes that represent their impact on the project, namely additive-veto sorting model, whi...

In the scope of MAVT (Multi-Attribute Value Theory), one of the most difficult tasks is the elicitation of criteria scaling constants of an additive model for the aggregation of criteria. That might be the reason why there are so many MCDM/A (Multi-Criteria Decision Making/Aiding) methods, among which is the FITradeoff (Flexible and Interactive Tra...

This study aims to demonstrate how the design of a decision support system (DSS) can improve the process of internal resource allocation in Brazil public universities. Currently, there are not any kind of general DSS for such a problem. To do so, the analysis is carried out by identifying the general model from the Brazilian Ministry of Education a...

This book deals with the choice of methods to be applied in the decision processes within organizations. It discusses the use of voting procedures for group decision in business organizations, focusing on decision-making contexts. Within this book the reader explores the relevant part of the decision-making process consisting of choosing the voting...

Background: Increasing competition among companies in the oil and gas industry results in a greater need for efficient processes. In Brazil, most oil operations are owned by a single company, which has a public trade structure. The company requires a large number of suppliers, including suppliers of raw materials, equipment and services. In fact, t...

The world is facing a growing water scarcity problem in the most diverse regions. The Rio Grande do Norte (RN), a Brazilian semi-arid region, is facing its severest drought in the last 100 years. Given this context, managing water resources and combating the effects of the drought have become even more important. Decisions made in this context may...

Multiple stakeholders’ preferences are considered for solving a healthcare facility location problem in the city of Milan, Italy. The preference modeling is based on the Flexible and Interactive Tradeoff (FITradeoff), a Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) method used to elicit criteria scaling constants in additive models. FITradeoff is an easy to...

This paper presents a group decision-making model using a distance aggregator based on Ordered Weighted Distance (OWD) which offers a solution that can reduce disagreement between decision makers (DMs). This paper discusses decision rules and sets out measures to evaluate compensatory effects that have a bearing on DMs' opinions. The model uses for...

Most of the voting procedures in the literature assume that voters have complete and transitive preferences over the alternatives. A basic premise is that any voter is able to evaluate any pair of alternatives in a set and select his/her preferred one, or indicate indifference between them. Nevertheless, some researchers have highlighted that voter...

One of the main tasks in a multi-criteria decision-making process is to define weights for the evaluation criteria. However, in many situations, the decision-maker (DM) may not be confident about defining specific values for these weights and may prefer to use partial information to represent the values of such weights with surrogate weights. Altho...

A group decision-making methodology is proposed that permits each member of a group to state his or her preferences with respect to combinations of alternative solutions to a problem during a collective process to arrive at a compromise via a special voting procedure. The possible combinations of alternatives are systematically generated using an o...

In developing countries, water distribution is a service that has limited resources for its expansion and modernization. Besides this problem, some regions suffer shortages of water. Thus, this resource is under-supplied to many communities. For this kind of situation, the planning of maintenance activities becomes even more important in order to r...

This paper proposes an application of the Flexible Interactive Tradeoff (FITradeoff) method for siting healthcare facilities. The selection of the location of complex facilities, as hospitals, can be considered as a multidimensional decision problem for the several issues to be taken into account and, moreover, for the variety of stakeholders that...

By following the steps of the Integrated Water Management (IWM) approach in the European Union, Brazil has moved from a top-down approach to water management to a participatory one that involves different segments of society. Since decisions regarding water affect all economic activities, the environment and life in communities, it is important tha...

A correct Network Segmentation (NS) is necessary to perform proper maintenance activities in water distribution networks (WDN). For this, usually, isolation valves are allocating near the ends of pipes, blocking the flow of water. However, the allocation of valves increases costs substantially for the water supply companies. Additionally, other cri...

Abstract The losses in the urban water supply networks have become a growing concern. There are several alternatives for the quantification, detection and monitoring of water losses. However, in general, water companies have budgetary and other constraints that hinder implementation. Therefore, this paper presents a model to aid the selection of a...

In our daily lives or professional settings, there are many decision problems involving multiple criteria, which may be conflicting and incommensurable. The complexity of real-world decision and the plethora of factors involved necessitate the implementation of sound theoretical frameworks for structuring decision-making processes. Multicriteria De...

Identifying the practical benefits of theoretical methods is a challenge in several fields. The operational research approach, known as Soft, has achieved a field of study status and, from that, Problem Structuring Methods (PSM) have been consolidated as support tools in the group decision process. Thus, aiming to contribute to the improvement of t...

Purpose – Cognitive maps are used in group decision processes to structure problems. The problem structuring methods helps decision makers to improve the comprehension of the problem, identifying alternative actions and conflicts. However, represents the individual perceptions in a representative group decision into a single structure can be a comp...

The allocation of water resources has been a source of tension between people all over the world. The need for water which everyone holds in common should be a motive for cooperation and not conflict. Very often in a problem-solving conflict, the lack of information leads to a distributive negotiation. This can turn into an integrative negotiation...

Water distribution networks require complex decision-making in solving many problems, such as allocation of resources for maintenance to control physical and economic water losses. Thus, in order to reduce losses in water distribution networks, the development of decision-making models through the multi-criteria approach becomes relevant. This stud...

Water resources are unevenly distributed across the territory and there is no stability concerning the availability of these resources. Conflicts over water use, particularly in situations where these resources are shared with other localities, require a participatory governance focused on cooperation and conflict resolution. For this reason, this...

This work is based on a disaggregation approach for the ELECTRE III method for the group decision-making. We provide a procedure in which the group is supported for modifying the parameters of outranking methods in an iterative and interactive process. In this work, we provide an application of the procedure through evaluating eight municipal distr...

This paper deals with the decision-making context with imprecise information regarding importance of objectives. The PROMETHEE method is integrated with surrogate weights in order to approach this situation. PROMETHEE methods have been applied in many contexts and this paper illustrates its use in the context of Technology Readiness Assessment for...

This paper puts forward a proposal for a multicriteria decision model for prioritizing technologies that are critical for power generation in the energy sector. It deals with the context of imprecise information regarding importance of criteria; then an integration of surrogate weights with the PROMETHEE method is undertaken in order to approach th...

Many problems in a water supply network, such as control of physical and economic losses, waste, and lack of a maintenance plan, involve different stakeholders to analyze complex decision making. Thus, several studies and models had been developed to aid decisions making in order to reduce unnecessary exploitation of water, and losses in the water...

In an increasingly complex, dynamic and highly competitive environment, there has been a proliferation of interorganizational relationships with an emphasis on cooperative relationships. For companies to define or redefine the terms of interdependence in established transactions, negotiations are required, and trust has been considered crucial for...

The evolution of outsourcing Information Technology (IT) Services has been accompanying the movement of technological innovations and the changes in IT governance. This development has motivated organizations to conduct decision-making integrating preferences from managers of different sectors in the Enterprise in order to improve the decision proc...

This work is based on a disaggregation approach for the ELECTRE III method for group decision-making. We propose an outranking method based on inferring inter-criteria parameters in the stage of the definition of parameters to support Decision Makers (DM) in a group decision-making approach. We provide a procedure in which the group is supported to...

Due to ageing and depreciation of the water distribution network components, leaks and ruptures are common on the water network. These problems can cause the water loss, sometimes the water contamination and the discontinuity in water supply, due the supply interruption during the infrastructure repair, as well as reduction of available water in th...

Resumo O aumento da competitividade entre as empresas demanda uma maior necessidade de eficiência nos processos. Esse cenário não é diferente para a área de energia. Nesse contexto, a maneira como as empresas selecionam seus fornecedores tem impacto significante no sucesso dos empreendimentos. O problema de seleção, por sua vez, apresenta um caráte...

This paper discusses the importance of information and knowledge of the stakeholders' expectations in the environmental planning process to improve the making of decisions. When decisions do not include all required information and/or do not properly analyze the interrelationship between them, the consequences can be disastrous. This paper presents...