Saariselkä MCDS methods in strategic planning- alternatives for AHP Annika Kangas & Jyrki Kangas

Ecological information Ecological / recreational information often has low quality –risk of ditch maintenance or clearcutting to watercourse –wildlife population viability  Need for methods that deal with low quality information and uncertainty

Public participation Public participation (e.g.in State forests) involves a large number of participants Group decision making involves several DMs  high costs and poor availability of information  Need for methods that have low information requirements and enable cheap preference elicition

Multicriteria approval Based on approval voting –instead of several voters several criteria considered Information requirements –criteria ranked according to importance –acceptability of alternatives with respect to each criteria, for example above average  acceptable below average  not acceptable

Usability Could be used for public participation –post or internet inquiries Criteria values measured in ratio or interval scale are downscaled to ordinal scale  information is lost

Outranking Ordinal, interval and ratio scale information can be used –information transformed to pseudo-criteria –uncertainty dealt with pseudo-criteria thresholds Weights of criteria interpreted as votes If intensities of preferences are known, information may be lost

Public participation example In State owned forests public participation obligatory Case study –four participants: FPS, regional group, local group and public –four main criteria: FPS’s business revenues, socio- economic values, recreational values and conservational values, measured with 17 variables –six strategies

Decision hierarchy

Observed rankings

Group decision making example Jointly owned forests problem in forest management –all owners need to approve management actions Case study –three owners with equal share –20 forest plans –six criteria: net incomes, value of the forest, landscape beauty, blueberry yield, capercaillie viability and biodiversity

Observed rankings

Requirements Methods that utilise both low and high quality information –forest information fairly accurate when compared to ecological criteria –all information in use, nothing wasted Uncertainty dealt with explicitly –Distributions of uncertain criterion values and / or criterion weights

SMAA - a possibility Stochastic multicriteria acceptance analysis –what kind of preferences support any one alternative Weight information can be exact, partial or nonexistent Criterion values –uncertain cardinal values from distribution –ordinal values converted to cardinal using simulation