Multi-criteria project portfolio selection and scheduling problem based on acceptability analysis

In a typical multi-criteria project portfolio selection and scheduling problem, a decision maker selects the optimal project portfolio and initiates work at the right time within a given planning horizon. Traditional methods cannot perfectly resolve such problem with uncertain criteria values and unknown weights. In this paper, we propose an approach based on stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis (SMAA) to effectively manage the multi-criteria project portfolio selection and scheduling problem. This SMAA-based approach has two main procedures. First, a backtracking algorithm is proposed to find all satisfactory portfolios. Second, the SMAA is conducted to evaluate satisfactory portfolios and help decision makers select the optimal portfolio. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the SMAA-based approach.