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NAIADE – Novel approach to imprecise assessment and decision environments

This article describes NAIADE, a software for Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA).
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naiade from front cover

NAIADE is software for Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) which has been developed by Giuseppe Munda, in cooperation between the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Joint Research Centre of the EC (in Ispra).

It is a discrete multi-criteria method whose impact (or evaluation) matrix may include either crisp, stochastic or fuzzy measurements of the performance of an alternative with respect to a judgment criterion gm, thus it is very flexible for real-world applications. This makes it particularly sutiable for particularly suitable for economic-ecological modelling incorporating various degrees of precision of the variables taken into consideration. For more details see the Featured Download (available from the right-hand column).

Details of OPTamos (Options for Participatory Transformation and Sustainability Management) – a sucessor to NAIADE – can be found at robin-decisionsupport.aau.at/ (please note that this website is subject to periodic maintenance).

Background

A problem of traditional approaches to MCA is that they only take into consideration cases where information is presented on an ordinal scale, and have problems dealing with mixed information (both quantitative and qualitative) due to problems with combining different levels of measurement and different levels of uncertainty between the two.

NAIADE uses a new approach based on a semantic distance using areas rather than the traditional intersections, thus overcoming one of the main weak points of traditional comparison methods.It is a discrete multi-criteria method whose impact (or evaluation) matrix may include either crisp, stochastic or fuzzy measurements of the performance of an alternative an with respect to a judgment criterion gm, thus it is very flexible for real-world applications. This makes it particularly sutiable for particularly suitable for economic-ecological modelling incorporating various degrees of precision of the variables taken into consideration.

A peculiarity of NAIADE is the use of conflict analysis procedures to be integrated with the multi-criteria results. NAIADE can give the following information:

  • ranking of the alternatives according to the set of evaluation criteria (i.e.

technical compromise solution/s);

  • indications of the distance of the positions of the various interest groups (i.e. possibilities of convergence of interests or coalition formations);
  • ranking of the alternatives according to actors’ impacts or preferences (social compromise solution).

The main components of the NAIADE method can be summarised as:

  • communication with the decision-maker is required to elicitate different relevant parameters, thus a constructive decision aid framework is implied;
  • the method is based on some aspects of the partial comparability axiom, in particular, a pairwise comparison between alternatives is carried out, and incomparability relations are allowed;
  • intensity of preference is taken into account, this implies that a certain degree of compensation between criteria is allowed, given the characteristics of the method it may be classified among partia compensatory methods;
  • for the indifference relation no transitivity is implied, the preference relation is max-min transitive;
  • a partial (or total) order of feasible alternatives is supplied. It has to be noted that the final ranking is a function of all the alternatives considered, this implies that if a dominated or a dominating action is introduced, the ranking may change; moreover if the best action is eliminated, the ranking of the other alternatives may also change, thus NAIADE does not respect the independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom.

Software

An updated version of the NAIADE aoftware – the software OPTamos – can be found at http://robin-decisionsupport.aau.at/ (please note that this site is subject to periodic maintenance).

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