a r t i c l e i n f o In complex strategic decision-making situations the need for well-structured support arises. To evaluate decision alternatives, information about the situation and its development must be determined, managed and processed by the best available experts. For various types of information different reasoning principles have been developed: deterministic, probabilistic, fuzzy a...

The Evidential Reasoning for Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (ER-MCDA) is based on a mapping process transforming a possibility distribution into a Bayesian basic belief assignment (BBA) related to a qualitative frame of discernement (FoD). Each element of the FoD is a fuzzy set. A new improved mapping method is proposed to get a final potentially non-Bayesian BBA on the FoD. We apply it to as...

This paper performs an assessment of 41 agricultural biogas plants located in Austria to determine their relative performance in terms of economic, environmental, and social criteria and corresponding indicators. The comparison of these renewable energy conversion plants is based on two complementary analyses. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was conducted to provide measures of radial efficienc...

The need for patient engagement has been recognized by regulatory agencies, but there is no consensus about how to operationalize this. One approach is the formal elicitation and use of patient preferences for weighing clinical outcomes. The aim of this study was to demonstrate how patient preferences can be used to weigh clinical outcomes when both preferences and clinical outcomes are uncerta...

in the way of finding economic and tolerable plant to the arid and semi-arid climatic conditions and prevent desertification in these areas, this study aims to assess agro-climatic suitability for producing saffron in east-azerbaijan province based on geographic information system (gis) spatial analysis technique. for this goal, several criteria including soil conditions, climatological indicat...

Background and objectives:   MCDA is a decision-making tool with increasing use in the healthcare sector, including HTA (Health Technology Assessment). By applying multiple criteria, including innovation, in a comprehensive, structured and explicit manner, MCDA fosters a transparent, participative, consistent decision-making process taking into consideration values of all stakeholders. This pap...

Effects-based operations (EBO) is a military concept that approaches the planning of operations from the systems perspective [1]. EBO looks into the final overall outcomes of the direct impacts of actions in a system. Using EBO terminology, the overall outcomes are called effects whose purpose is to fulfill pre-determined higher-level objectives of the operation. The planning problem of EBO is ...

A new framework, Decerns, for multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) of a wide range of practical problems on risk management is introduced. Decerns framework contains a library of modules that are the basis for two scalable systems: DecernsMCDA for analysis of multicriteria problems, and DecernsSDSS for multicriteria analysis of spatial options. DecernsMCDA includes well known MCDA methods and...

The management of waste cooking oil (WCO) often poses significant challenges. improper disposal WCO results in negative environmental impacts and economic losses. However, from a circular economy perspective, can be recycled used as sustainable feedstock for numerous industrial products, replacing virgin vegetable oils. This approach enables the recovery resources while simultaneously addressin...