Mutlicriteria Decision Aiding: Challenges in Real-Life Interventions

The field of multicriteria decision aiding (MCDA) has been growing over the last decades, with new methods and applications published in various areas. Still, numerous studies assume that the decision problem is given, that the sets of alternatives and criteria are already structured, and that the stakeholders, when they are involved, share a common value system. In fact, few papers describe real MCDA interventions and the difficulties and hurdles encountered. This chapter aims to remedy this situation by providing two concrete examples of MCDA interventions in real-life problems involving participants from Quebec City, Canada. The first intervention, in the transportation field, helped to prioritize the redesign of streets, and the second intervention, in the urban planning field, aided to rethink the role and jurisdiction of a municipal architectural conservation and protection commission. We describe the decision problems, the organizational contexts, the involved participants, the main aims of intervention, the encountered challenges and the post-project evaluation results. We thereby provide concrete examples of problems encountered in real-life socio-technical MCDA processes and offer advice and insights based on our experience.