ABSTRACT
Evaluating the design and operation of a service system frequently involves cost and customer service as the main criteria. This chapter presents two approaches to evaluate the performance of service systems under multiple objectives: multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). MCDM models and methods have been applied in financial engineering to select optimal investment portfolios by banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and others. When there are many criteria, it would be difficult for a decision making to rank order them precisely, as required by the Borda method. Interactive methods for MCMP problems rely on the progressive articulation of preferences by the decision making. One of the most successful applications of multi-criteria decision making has been in the area of portfolio selection, an important problem faced by individual investors and financial analysts in investment companies. One of the problems in applying MCDM methods in practice is the lack of commercially available software implementing these methods.
