Monday, March 12, 2012

MCDM Methodolies, Applications and other Stats 1999-2009

Introduction: This study, conducted by researchers at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran examined the applications of the MCDM methodologies. It examined who was using these methodologies, in what field and which of these methodologies were being applied. The study examined 628 papers from 20 scholarly journals ranging from 1999-2009. The study classified these papers in 12 application areas.

Study Summary: The study sought to classify data regarding publications regarding MCDM analysis. The authors identified the method(s) of the publications, application area, journal of publication, year of publication, nationality of the author and identified a fuzzy or crisp rating for each application.

The authors note that initially, between 1999 and 2009, 1128 papers were published in more than 200 journals. However, many of these journals only had a single MCDM related publication. They narrowed the scope of their search to the twenty publications with the most MCDM related articles and found that these twenty publications contained 628 total MCDM related publications. Of these papers, 386 (61.5%) had a direct application of MCDM theory.

Next, the authors identified twelve key areas of MCDM application. These areas are as follows; environment management, water management, business and financial management, transportation and logistics, manufacturing and assembly, energy management, agricultural and forestry management, managerial and strategic planning, project management and evaluation, social service, military service and other. The authors then identified 27 MCDM techniques and cross referenced the MCDM techniques with the applications to produce this chart:

Conclusion Summary:
There is a detailed summary of each of the publications in their respective application area that I'm not going to go into here. However, there were some interesting overall findings.

The authors found that the number of MCDM related publications has drastically increased over the past ten years:
The authors also found that the overwhelming majority of publications were from the European Journal of Operational Research:
Finally, and what I found most interesting, was the author's nationalities and frequency of MCDM publications by nationality:

3 comments:

  1. It would be interesting to see if the use of MCDM in private industry is also increasing as more academic publications. It could probably be reasoned that if use of MCDM is increasing in private industry along with its increased used in academic journals that MCDM is not just an academic tool but also a valuable and practical "real world" tool.

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  2. This is so well-written and understandable. I wish it could be published. I think we all would have a much better idea of what's really going on. I'm looking forward to more.

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  3. It seems to be a very popular research topic to compare a couple dozen MCDM methodologies - I see a few such articles just among our posts on this blog. It's hard to rate them universally because they're designed for specific situational uses, but I do wonder which are most applicable in an intel-analysis setting.

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