Optimization of military operation cost price by using multi-criteria analysis method

Abstract

The military operation is defined as a complex project, which is implemented as a planned process, in which objectives of diverse importance are achieved, with limited resources, within a specific area, and for a specific time. The cost price is always a limiting factor, but may be a crucial one in decisionmaking. In addition to the necessity of making an optimal decision on the use of forces in an operation for the purpose of achieving the desired final situation, it is very important to achieve the objective at as little cost as possible. The paper presents a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) method, specially developed for this problem, which is used for the optimization of the cost price. A number of variants of action Ni have the outputs/results that can be presented as quantitative values Yik , which have the probability of occurrence pik and different cost price Cik. Now the effectiveness can be calculated as a mathematical expectation, as well as the cost price of the variant Ni as the mathematical expectation of the sum of the products of the price multiplied by the probability of its occurrence. The aim is to achieve as greater effectiveness and as lower cost price as possible. Optimal variant is the one which has lower cost price than all those variants that are more effective, and the effectiveness greater than all those variants that are less expensive.