Ethics in Operations Research and Sustainable Development, International Transactions in Operational Research,International Transactions on Operational Research

In about a hundred years major social, economical, environmental and technical problems arose so intensively that Mankind's very existence is today jeopardised. The authors argue that Operations Research (OR) should be more strongly involved by developing models to face today's crucial challenges. OR should change drastically because it is traditionally mainly involved with optimisation problems, which are often counterproductive in the sense of ethical behaviour: new basic approaches are requested. This paper provides some avenues on how to develop instruments for addressing Mankind's sustainability problems, and for complying with ethical principles. It is proposed to have a mix of techniques, mainly: systems thinking, multi-criteria decision-making and dynamic control. A global framework, called ASMC (Adaptive, Systemic, Multi-criteria, Control procedure), is proposed for developing these ideas. Some Sustainable-Development applications are presented.

Jaar van publicatie:2010

Trefwoorden:Sustainable Development, Systems Thinking, Multicriteria analysis