DAME-Microsoft Excel add-in for solving multicriteria decision problems with scenarios

The main goal of every economic agent is to make a good decision, especially in economic environment with many investment alternatives and evaluation criteria. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is widely used approach for solving decision making problems. There exists wide range of computer programs that are able to help decision makers to make good decisions. Main disadvantage of those programs is that they are commercial and relatively quite expensive and thus it prevents them to be used by small companies or individual entrepreneurs. This paper introduces a new Microsoft Excel add-in named DAME – Decision Analysis Module for Excel. Comparing to other software products for solving multicriteria decision problems, DAME is free, able to work with scenarios or multiple decision makers, allows for easy manipulation with data and utilizes capabilities of widespread spreadsheet Microsoft Excel. Users can structure their decision models into three levels scenarios, criteria and variants. Standard pair-wise comparisons are used for evaluating both criteria and variants. For each pair-wise comparison matrix there is calculated an inconsistency index. There are provided three different methods for the evaluation of the weights of criteria, the variants as well as the scenarios – Saaty’s Method, Geometric Mean Method and Fuller’s Triangle Method. All calculations are instant so users can easily see what happen if value of any input is changed. Apart from the final ordering of the variants there are also shown all intermediate results, so it is clearly seen how the synthesis was produced. The results of the decision model are depicted by a bar chart. Capabilities of the proposed software package are demonstrated on couple of illustrating examples of real life decision problems.