A Goal Programming Based Interactive Decision Support System

The purpose of this research was to develop a multicriteria decision making tool which could take into account the cognitive limitations of human information processing. Specifically, an interactive goal programming methodology was devised which sought to minimize the difficulty of prioritizing goals and of restructuring problems to find improved solutions. This methodology employs a priority elicitation procedure which can accept a variety of ill to well-defined priority structures. It provides feedback after each solution is generated. This feedback describes the tradeoff inherent in improving the achievement of any unsatisfied goals. Goal attainment probabilities and possible goal level revisions are also presented to users of the model to assist them in evaluating alternative restructures of the model. These modifications have been incorporated into a generalizable decision support system which has been tested in an academic decision making environment.