The seminar “Social and environmental aspects: multi-criteria approaches”, by professor Rafael Caballero Fernández (Director of the Department of Applied Economics (Mathematics), Quantitative Methods Area for Economics and Business, Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences, UMA), will take place on November 28, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., in PA1 amphitheatre (Mathematics building, floor -1).
Summary:
«In the real decision-making processes in the economic sphere its increasingly more frequent to consider social and environmental criteria, in addition to the traditional economic criteria. Therefore, it is natural the use of multi-criteria decision-making techniques.
Our group studies certain problems of diverse nature, which have a special importance for society. Specifically, we study the formulation of healthy and sustainable diets, the evaluation of tourist destinations based on their sustainability and competitiveness, the evaluation of the performance of Spanish universities and the treatment of waste in a threefold aspect: efficiency of waste water treatment plants ( WWTPs), efficiency in the selective collection of waste and the design of routes for the collection of urban solid waste.
For this reason, the methodological part of our group is dedicated to the study of the application of multi-criteria techniques (specifically, Programming by Goals and Reference Point Methods) to the design of synthetic indicators, which allow us to evaluate the state of a system from a predefined system of indicators; the adaptation of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique to the study of the efficiency in the problems of the case-study; the design of specific metaheuristics for certain complex problems that do not allow their treatment using traditional exact techniques and the use of the Reference Point Method to generate Pareto-efficient solutions; and the design of interactive methods that allow decisions to be made in complex environments.
We will present a brief tour of the different lines of work of our research group.»
CEG-IST seminars are free and open to Técnico community.
