Preface to the Special Issue on Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Current Challenges and Future Trends

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/itor.12515

Intl. Trans. in Op. Res. 25 (2018) 759–761

DOI: 10.1111/itor.12515

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Preface to the Special Issue on

Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Current Challenges

and Future Trends

The pioneers of South Carolina: The genesis of MCDM

It seems suitable to introduce this special issue by giving a few brushstrokes to frame the Multiple

Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) paradigm within a historical perspective. In this direction, we

consider that the starting point of the MCDM movement was possibly in 1951, when Koopmans

established the concept of efficient or non-dominated vector that was later developed by Kuhn

and Tucker to obtain the optimality conditions for the existence of non-dominated solutions.

Following another direction, Charnes and Cooper, in 1955 and 1961, introduced the basic idea of

goal programming, first within a constrained regressioncontext, and second for addressing the issue

of incompatibilities among constraints of linear programming problems. There are also remarkable

precursors to this paradigm, like the introduction in 1968 of the outranking relationships as a

foundation of the ELECTRE methods by Roy, as well as the publication one year later by Raiffa of

a memorandum of the RAND Corporation, where the seminal ideas of the multi-attribute utility

theory were introduced. These fundamental contributions clearly indicate that since its origins

MCDM is firmly rooted with the classic optimization principles, which the new paradigm aims

to extend and to increase its empirical corroboration capacity. In other words, MCDM aims to

increase the understanding of how people make decisions, as well as to provide decision makers

with sound analytical tools to aid in making sensible decisions.

During the 1960s, the above outlined seminal ideas evolved slowly. However, there was not

a lot of enthusiasm for MCDM during that decade. The crucial moment or turning point for

MCDM was October 1972 when the First International Conference on MCDM was held at the

University of South Carolina. The actual pioneers of the MCDM movementattended this historical

conference. They were young scientists in their early thirties presenting results derived from their

PhD dissertations. Besides these young scientists, some big figures in classic optimization also

attended and contributed to this memorableconference. A non-exhaustive list of the “Young Turks”

(understanding by this term a group of young intellectuals, including John Maynard Keynes, who

were graduate students at King’s College, Cambridge, and who led, in the early 20th century, a

protest movement aiming to change the Victorian norms ruling the King’s) would include, among

others in alphabetic order, Dyer, Ignizio, Ijiri, Keeney, Steuer, Yu, and Zeleny. And among the big

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