Integrated Objective-based Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Application to Singapore Climate Mitigation Policy

Chen Peijun

Abstract

As climate issue continues to be one of the main concerns internationally, numerous strategies have been proposed aiming to evaluate the existing climate mitigation policies. However, there is a lack of comprehensiveness in the existing approaches as well as the tendency to neglect the relevance of objective values during decision making. Moreover, climate mitigation policies involve the decision making of multiple stakeholders and hence the integration of multiple stakeholders’ decisions is necessary.

The thesis proposes an objective-based multiple criteria decision making approach. Frist of all, this approach assesses the scores of the various problems of concern, after which assigns the scores obtained to the corresponding objectives. The existing alternatives are examined by obtaining their objective values based on the extent of fulfilment in meeting the objectives. The second part of the approach is to assess the alternatives by the traditional Analytic Hierarchy Process based on multiple criteria decision making to obtain the direct multiple attribute (DMA) scores.

The integration of objective values and DMA scores in this thesis consists of three proposed methods. Firstly, this could be done by simple observation of the two-dimensional diagram, the alternative that dominates in both objective value and DMA score is thus the dominating alternative. Secondly, in the case where there is no dominating alternative, it is possible to adopt a weighted average method to obtain a weighted average sum of the two values for each alternative. Last but not least, multi-attribute trade-off analysis is introduced to simplify the evaluation process. For multiple stakeholders, this thesis proposes a mathematics model in order to maximize the level of agreement among the stakeholders. The overall ranking of the alternatives could be found based on the respective rankings and scores of alternatives from each stakeholder.

By introducing the integrated approach incorporating the objective values to the DMA scores, the framework aims to provide a more comprehensive approach in providing decision support for decision makers. Moreover, the involvement of multiple stakeholders during decision making is an extension of the thesis. After all, the thesis aims to enhance the decision making in evaluating climate mitigation policies in the context of Singapore.