Eight Concepts of Optimality

The notion of optimality and the processes of optimization are clearly pivotal in the areas of economics, engineering, management and business. These are mostly "constrained" problems where search for optimality relies on some form of evaluating of tradeoffs. There can be not tradeoffs along a single dimension: optimality is therefore a fundamentally multicriterion concept. Here we develop the notion of optimum as a welldefined balance among multiple criteria. We end up with the eight different, separate and mutually irreducible optimality concepts where the traditional single-objective optimality is only a special case.