Resource Analysis in Project Evaluation: A Multicriteria Approach

Abstract

In this paper we develop and demonstrate the application of a goal programming model. It is designed to assist top management in incorporating organizational goals when allocating funds to competing projects. Investment decisions, however, normally involve several, often conflicting goals. The fact that some of these goals cannot be measured in dollars or other scales further complicates the problem. Among the many proposed methodologies of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM), goal programming (GP) is perhaps the most popular and widely used. It provides optimal solutions; however, it has a major drawback: the decision-maker must specify the goals and priorities a priori. To overcome this problem, we suggest the Delphi method, a systematic procedure to obtain a consensus from a group of participants. It is conducted prior to GP to (1) identify the goals, (2) determine priorities among the goals, and (3) establish a target level for each goal. To test the practicality and extent of applicability, the proposed model is directly applied to evaluate rural road projects of the Division of Transportation, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), US Department of Interior.