An integrated approach to project evaluation and selection

Effective project evaluation necessitates incorporating the many conflicting objectives of decision maker(s) into decision models. Among the many proposed methodologies of multicriteria decision making, goal programming is perhaps the most popular and widely used. Although it incorporates multiple objectives and arrives at an optimal solution, its major drawback is that the decision maker(s) must specify goals and priorities a priori. To overcome this problem the Delphi method is suggested to be applied prior to goal programming formulation so that the objectives and their corresponding aspiration levels can be identified. Another drawback of goal programming is that it does not provide a systematic approach to set priorities and trade-offs among objectives. For this purpose an analytical hierarchy process is used. The application of the proposed methodology is then discussed and illustrated through an example