MCDM Junior Researcher Best Paper Award Finalists

By Yeawon Yoo

The MCDM Junior Researcher Best Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers in the field of multicriteria decision making written by a junior researcher or a team of junior researchers. After the thorough reviewing process, three junior academic researchers are selected as finalists of the award.

Margaret M. Wiecek from Clemson University opened the session by welcoming the room to the first-ever MCDM Junior Research Best Paper Award contest.

The first presenter, Valentina Ferretti from London School of Economics and Political Science, gave a presentation titled, “From Stakeholder Analysis to Cognitive Mapping and Multi-Attribute Value Theory: An Integrated Approach for Policy Support.” Valentina said, “The purpose of this study is to provide an operational decision support framework that guides policymakers in strategic decisions.” She also emphasized the importance of the project. “There are three reasons why it is relevant to the real-world problem. The first one is public policy making because we are allocating the public resources via the transparent decision process. The second is the location problems and consensus building issues. The last one is urban sustainability. As well as satisfying key stakeholders, we are looking forward to achieving sustainability solution, which aligns with the theme of the conference,” she said.

The second presenter, Milosz Kadzinski from Poznan University of Technology, presented his work, “Application of a Novel PROMETHEE-based Method for Construction of a Group Compromise Ranking to Prioritization of Green Suppliers in Food Supply Chain.” Milosz explained the impact of his research saying that “the current supply chain management is facing the problem of pollution and traffic control. So, our research addressed the environmental problem in the food sector by proposing the novel solution. The research aims to select the most preferred ingredient supplier.” The novel algorithms and robustness analysis are also introduced to solve the multicriteria decision-making problem.

The final presentation “Bilevel Programming for Generating Discrete Representations in Multiobjective Optimization” was given by Gokhan Kirlik from the University of Maryland Medical System. Gokhan said that “many real-world applications require considering several conflicting objective functions. Our method tries to obtain a representation of the nondominated set when the decision maker’s preferences are not available.”