Multi-Criteria Analysis

A decision-making tool, with a range of techniques, developed for complex problems involving many criteria. The aim is to balance complimentary and contrasting outcomes through trade-offs so as to find an optimal solution by a decision-making team.

One particular benefit of this tool is that of being able to engage stakeholders and specialists within the decision-making process, providing a means of reference to objective criteria and communication between a range of parties.

The identification and formulation of appropriate aims, objectives and criteria along with determining weightings and scoring of criteria and sub-components needs to be carried out in a transparent and informed way as this will help to reduce the extent of subjectivity built into the analysis and final decision-making process.

Taking this holistic approach to decision-making can allow different subject areas to be allocated to specialists who would work on the details and then feed in the summaries to the overall team making judgements on the different elements of the overall analysis.

It is also called Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis.