21 December 2011

Call for Papers: Multicriteria Decision Aid Applications for Social and Educational Services

A special issue of International Journal of Multicriteria Decision Making

Muliticriteria decision aid analysis (MCDA) has been widely and efficiently exploited in a considerable number of real world applications covering many different fields such as financial management, human resource management, marketing, production, engineering, education and so on.

 Since 1970, the four theoretical trends of MCDA (value systems’ approaches, outranking relations methods, disaggregation-aggregation approaches and multiobjective linear programming) inspired researchers to produce significant works concerning the application of MCDA in real world case studies. Many of these works have been presented and published, providing systematic methodological approaches, good practices and the appropriate software for further use and exploitation.

 In recent years, massive changes have been happening worldwide with positive and negative impacts, which are mainly due to: (a) economical crisis situations which are slowing down the development of national economies, and (b) the spreading of the use of the information and communication technologies. Sectors which are most influenced include: (a) social services, (b) social insurance, (c) health services and (d) education. This new situation is motivating researchers to study and address the subjects and problems related to or resulting from this complicated situation.

 The main target of this special issue is to collect new, representative and contemporary research works concerning the application of MCDA to real world case studies in the above-mentioned sectors. Papers must be focused on the new situation as far as social and educational services are concerned. The presence of the exploitation of multicriteria decision aid approaches and their contribution to the unravelling of problems related to social services, health services, social insurance and education is the core aim of this issue.

Suitable topics which can be considered innovative for MCDM related to social and educational services include but are not limited to:
  • Multicriteria decision support systems
  • Multiciteria decision aid approaches and methodologies
  • Preference modelling and disaggregation-aggregation approaches
  • Data mining and multicriteria decision aid analysis
  • Collaborative decision making under multiple criteria
  • Multiobjective mathematical programming
  • Outranking relations theory and practice
  • Multi-attribute utility/value theory
  • Risk analysis and multicriteria decision aid approaches
  • Performance management and multicriteria decision aid
Proper areas of interest for applications focused on social and educational services include but are not limited to:
  • Health and social Welfare
  • Education and lifelong learning
  • Re-engineering and recruitment in public and private sectors
  • Innovation management
  • e-government and social services
  • Social insurance
  • e-learning
  • Evaluation of social services
  • Evaluation of learning activities
  • Human resource management
  • Operations management for social and educational services
  • Learning organisations
  • Social networking
Important Date
Submission deadline: 31 March, 2012

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