Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The growing environmental awareness and the apparent conflict between economic and environmental objectives was the main impetus that pushed energy planners during the early eighties towards the use of MCDA methods. Thereafter, the rapid changes and the increasing complexity of the energy market gave rise to further methodological developments. Although the energy market restructuring and ongoing liberalization seemed to restrict the purpose for centralized energy decisions, they added new dimensions in energy planning. Increasing competition along with the prerequisite for sustainability have broadened the energy application field by bringing out new challenges for the development of integrated multicriteria and multi-stakeholders approaches also taking uncertainty into consideration. This paper aims at illustrating the evolution of MCDA approaches, in the context of the emerging problems faced by energy planners and other stakeholders involved in energy-related decision situations, one of the most active and exciting areas of application of MCDA models and methods.

The interaction between a complex socio-economic environment and the extremely fast pace of development of new telecommunication technologies and services justifies the interest in using multicriteria evaluation in decision making processes associated with several phases of network planning and design. Based on an overview of current and foreseen evolutions in telecommunication network technologies and services we begin by identifying and discussing challenges and issues concerning the use of multicriteria analysis (M.A.) in telecommunication network planning and design problems. Next we present a review of contributions in these areas, with particular emphasis on network modernisation planning and routing problems. We will also outline an agenda of current and future research trends and issues in this application area of multicriteria modelling.

Sustainable development is a multidimensional concept, including socio-economic, ecological, technical and ethical perspectives. In making sustainability policies operational, basic questions to be answered are sustainability of what and whom? As a consequence, sustainability issues are characterised by a high degree of conflict. The main objective of this Chapter is to show that multiple-criteria decision analysis is an adequate approach for dealing with sustainability conflicts at both micro and macro levels of analysis. To achieve this objective, lessons, learned from both theoretical arguments and empirical experience, are reviewed. Guidelines of “good practice” are suggested too.

We present an overview of the current state of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) decision support software. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature to solve multiple criteria decision-making problems, and there is an abundance of software that implements these approaches. Much of the software is still quasi-experimental, developed by academic researchers to test specific algorithms or to solve a specific problem on an ad hoc basis.