Innovative methodological tools for research, teaching and consulting activities in MCDA
Résumé
The aim of this presentation is to highlight the latest developments on innovative methodological tools which can support research, teaching and consulting activities in the field of Multicriteria Decision Aid (MCDA).
We first focus on the latest progress on the XMCDA web-services and diviz. The latter allows to combine very conveniently distributed calculation resources via so-called algorithmic MCDA workflows. More precisely, we underline a new feature which enables to include locally executed programs in the algorithmic workflows. Among other things, this characteristic facilitates the testing of new algorithms in complex workflows, which in turn should ease their deployment as XMCDA web-services.
Then we present two original tools which should support the adoption of the XMCDA web-services and the diviz software, and should contribute to a new methodological work on MCDA techniques. First we present web interfaces for each of the existing 58 web-services, which are automatically generated from standardized description files. These web pages facilitate the interaction with these web-services, either for real-world uses or for demonstration means. Second we detail a web site which allows to store algorithmic MCDA workflows generated by diviz. This web site can for example be used to work collaboratively on a decision problem or to store students' works in an MCDA course. It also implements a search engine which allows to easily find workflows according to various criteria (author, web-services, bibliography,
).