Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approaches to the TRADOC Battlefield Development Plan

摘要

Each of the 13 TRADOC mission areas must prioritize deficiencies within their own mission area. The particular problem for TRADOC is the integration of these 13 prioritized lists into a single ordered list of battlefield deficiencies - the Battlefield Development Plan. Formulation of the BDP is a yearly process. It greatly influences the development of programs and the allocation of resources toward correcting deficiencies in order of their importance. The development of a rigorous and understandable prioritization methodology has changed dramatically over the years. Pairwise comparison of deficiencies is the logic of the current process. This thesis presents two alternative approaches to solving the BDP problem. Using TOPSIS, a multiple attribute decision making method, the prioritization process is simplified and properly driven by the criteria critical to battlefield success. An evolutionary procedure is presented first. It can be fully automated while the consequences are easily grasped by the decision maker. The second approach scrubs the current BDP framework in favor of a more scientific process. Both methods offer several advantages including user-friendly automation, weighting, and consistency. Most importantly, these alternatives are directly linked to the multiple criteria the Army provides for guiding the selection and determining the importance of battlefield deficiencies across all mission areas.