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30 Decisions involving multiple objectives: SMART
comfortable for staff to work in. In contrast, the Bilton Village office is a
new building which will provide excellent working conditions, but it is
several miles from the center of town, where most potential customers
are to be found. The owner is unsure how to set about making his choice,
given the number of factors involved.
An overview of the analysis
The technique which we will use to analyze the office location problem is
based on the Simple Multi-attribute Rating Technique (SMART), which
was put forward by Edwards 4 in 1971. Because of the simplicity of
both the responses required of the decision maker and the manner in
which these responses are analyzed, SMART has been widely applied.
The analysis involved is transparent, so the method is likely to yield an
enhanced understanding of the problem and be acceptable to the decision
maker who is distrustful of a mathematical ‘black-box’ approach. This,
coupled with the relative speed by which the method can be applied,
means that SMART has been found to be a useful vehicle for decision
conferences (see Chapter 12), where groups of decision makers meet
to consider a decision problem. The cost of this simplicity is that the
method may not capture all the detail and complexities of the real
problem. Nevertheless, in practice, the approach has been found to be
extremely robust (see Watson and Buede 5 ).
The main stages in the analysis are shown below:
Stage 1: Identify the decision maker (or decision makers). Inourproblem
we will assume that this is just the business owner, but in
Chapter 13 we will look at the application of SMART to problems
involving groups of decision makers.
Stage 2: Identify the alternative courses of action. In our problem these
are, of course, represented by the different offices the owner
can choose.
Stage 3: Identify the attributes which are relevant to the decision problem.The
attributes which distinguish the different offices will be factors
such as rent, size and quality of working conditions. In the next
section we will show how a value tree can be of use when
identifying relevant attributes.
Stage 4: For each attribute, assign values to measure the performance of
the alternatives on that attribute. For example, how well do the