8. Managerial Vulnerability Assessment Models

As indicated throughout this book, managers, political pundits, policy makers, scientists, and even hackers, often decisions made without full knowledge of situations. Clearly, this leaves us with changes of enjoying or suffering the outcomes good or bad, respectively. At the same time, one might contend that that are means of increasing changes that the decision being make is ‘good.’ In this line of thinking, it is generally accepted that making decision based on single criterion is a catalyst for disastrous outcomes. This is especially if such a decision involves multiple conflicting value systems, which could be approached using a multi-criteria decision approach. In this chapter, we provide a literature review on the use of multi-criteria decision analysis. Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a sub-discipline of operations research that explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making (both in daily life or in professional settings). The review provided therein is to enable those taking the lead with sufficient information regarding the utility of different MCDA-related methods and tools. Emphasis is placed on applications and how such methods have paved the way for decision support systems in complex decision making from a scholarly perspective.