Multi-Criteria Decision Support for Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems (Topic B.2)

– Development of an interactive decision support system for small and medium enterprises –

Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems (CEMIS) are organizational-technical systems which systematically obtain, process, and make environmentally relevant information available in companies. Current systems are often used to prove that legal regulations are adhered to and thus are not used to their full potential. Based on the data obtained, they offer the possibility to assist decision makers in small and medium enterprises in identifying economic and environmental improvements along the process chain. The implementation of these improvements is usually possible by several actions from which the decision maker in the company has to choose. This requires a combination of CEMIS and decision support methods. However, known decision support methods are either too complex or do not take the preferences of the decision maker enough into account. The aim of the thesis is to fill this gap and to develop a multi-criteria decision support model that takes the preferences of the decision maker into consideration but is also understandable without external support.

As a basis, the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method developed by Hwang and Yoon (1981) is used. Its main advantage is the easy underlying concept which makes it comprehensible. However, it is solely objective and does not include the preferences of a decision maker. Therefore, the method is extended to include two aspects which help to increase the acceptance of the presented solution. Firstly, a satisficing threshold is introduced to ensure that criteria are no longer solely treated as "the more, the better", so the decision may set a clearly defined target value. Secondly, one disadvantage of TOPSIS is that two alternatives may not be clearly distinguishable. In these cases, the decision maker is requested to provide input to solve the incomparability.

Ideally, the model is implemented as a software prototype. With the help of the program it is then possible to solve multi-criteria decision problems quickly and easily. The advantage for decision makers is to get a fast initial impression of possible economic and environmental improvements that are worth to be further investigated.