An Experimental Comparison of MOLP Interactive Approaches Based on a Regional Planning Model

Abstract

This paper reports how previous methodological studies and experiments in power system planning and telecommunication network moderization planning led to the development of interactive environments to deal with multiple objective linear programming problemms (MOLP), particularly with three objective functions, paying special attention to the use of graphical displays and controls. These tools are well suited to assist decision maakers (DMs) in making a progressive and selective familiarization with the effieciet solution set. However, whenever the problem demand the consideration of more than three objective functions, some of those techniques could not be used, and the interactive environments had to be expanded in a coherent manner to preserve the usefulness of visual inspection as a cornerstone of computer tools to assist DMs. SOMMIX is control panel-based interactive environment which offers a large set of commmands (embodying search strategies, techniques to compute ew nondominated solutions, ways to express his/her preference, means of iteraction and information presentation, etc.) to assist the user, by facilitating and motivating the successive actions throughout the interactve solution search process. The main aim is to shed some light on the usefulness of computer packages which are flexible, user-friendly and technically sound to accomodate the very nature of human decision making processes. Using a regional planning model as a laboratory case study this paper is aimed at presentig some computer experiments with two classical multiple objectivve interactive methods (STEM and Zoints-Wallenius) and the SOMMIX ackage.