What is V•I•S•A?

Most decisions require us to take account of multiple criteria. On a personal level, whenever we make a purchase, we have in mind both the cost and quality of the product, in deciding how to spend our leisure time we take account of the anticipated enjoyment, possibly the risks involved, possibly the cost and time taken up. Similarly, the majority of business decisions call for the consideration of multiple and often conflicting criteria, such as long-term and short-term benefits, costs and risks. The field of multiple criteria analysis offers a number of approaches which take explicit account of multiple criteria in providing structure and support to the decision making process. V•I•S•A is a software package to support this form of analysis. Decisions are modeled using a hierarchical weighted value function. An important and distinctive feature of V•I•S•A is its extensive facility for visual interactive sensitivity analysis (hence the name V•I•S•A), which enables decision makers to explore the implications of changing or differing priorities and values.

In this help we assume that you are already familiar with the use of value functions to model multiple criteria decisions. If not, we suggest that you have a look at one of the suggested references before using the software.

References V Belton and T Stewart, (2001), “Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: An Integrated Approach”, Kluwer.

V Belton, (1990), “Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis - Practically the Only Way to Choose”in Hendry L.C. and Eglese R.W. (1990) (Eds) Operational Research Tutorial Papers 1990 Operational Research Society, Birmingham 53-101

P Goodwin and G. Wright, (1991), “Decision Analysis for Managerial Judgment”, Wiley