Methodologies and Applications of Multiple Criteria Decision Making for Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable development requires critical strategic planning to guide the developments of global environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. Without taking sustainability into consideration, neither government managements nor enterprises can fully achieve many of their long-term environmental quality goals and economic benefits. However, the incorporation of sustainability considerations requires a shift from focusing solely on the environmental perspective to also acknowledging the broader assessments of cultural continuity and compatibility, technological knowledge, and policy. Multiple variables often exist in a well-defined sustainability problem, and most of the sustainability-related issues involve multiple criteria; thus, it is reasonable to adopt the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to handle sustainability-related problems.

This Special Issue seeks methodologies and applications of MCDM methods, such as AHP/ANP, TOPSIS, VIKOR, GRA, etc., and their hybrid methods, for handling sustainable development issues from researchers and practitioners. Topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:

• Analyzing and evaluating the factors affecting decision making under different sustainable issues;
• In the decision model for sustainable development, applying a novel method to find suitable values for the weight assignment of the influencing factors;
• Optimizing algorithm steps and simplifying decision models for sustainability issues;
• Adopting MCDM methods and tools to model different types of sustainable issues;
• Using hybrid approaches to solve complex sustainable problems;
• Developing an effective sustainable assessment system to conduct a reference for policy-making.

Prof. Dr. Gang Kou
Prof. Dr. Enrique Herrera-Viedma
Dr. Daji Ergu
Dr. Fawaz E. Alsaadi
Guest Editors

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