You can attend a workshop regardless of whether you register for the entire conference or not. In either case you need to click on the registration link, select the workshops that you want to attend and make the required payment. Registration to the workshops can be done either along with the registration to the conference or in a different time and it will also be available on site. The schedule is in Eastern Standard Time, EST (GMT-5).
Thursday 03 December, 2020
08:00 am - 09:00 am
Sensitivity Analysis (Orrin Cooper)
09:00 am - 10:00 am
How to conduct a negotiation using AHP (Luis Vargas)
10:00 am - 11:00 am
How to improve your chance of getting your AHP/ANP paper published (Enrique Mu)
11:00 am -12:00 pm
The how and whys of ANP row sensitivity (William J. Adams)
12:00 pm - 01:00 pm
Benefits-Opportunities-Costs and Risks calculations demystified (Elena Rokou)
01:00 pm - 02:00 pm
Meeting Facilitation (Daniel Saaty)
Sensitivity Analysis
Orrin Cooper Great, we synthesized our model and have a final ranking! But we aren't quite done yet. How robust is the decision? Which criteria are most important or influential? What would happen if "this" or "this" criterion had been weighted differently? Would it even make a difference in the final outcome? Sensitivity analysis is an important component in the decision making process. The findings from the sensitivity analysis can be just as important as the final ranking.
This session is organized into 3 sections:
1) Understanding the Supermatrix and aggregation process is key to doing good sensitivity analysis – we will move from an unweighted Supermatrix to the final ranking in a complex model.
Short Bio
Orrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management. He came from the University of Pittsburgh where he obtained his PhD in Decision Science and Operations Management. Former studies also include a Master of Public Administration from Brigham Young University and a Bachelor of Art in Psychology and Business Management from Utah Valley University. The specialties that he brings to the University of Memphis include multi-criteria decision making, specifically with the Analytic Network Process (ANP), and behavioral operations management. Orrin's motivation in the classroom is to prepare students for the workforce. "Students need to know how to use Excel as they enter the workplace; it makes a huge difference to an employer to have experience with this amazing tool." He also places particular emphasis on developing Cognitive Reflection skills (critical thinking) in his students. This focus is driven by his former work experience as a budget analyst. The focus on education in the classroom is also accompanied by his current research to test for Coherency in the ANP Supermatrix. He also expresses a particular interest to focus more on behavioral operations management, in the near future. Recent published works include a research article in European Journal of Operational Management, "Linking Validation: A Search for Coherency within the Supermatrix" and "Linking Disjoint Supermatrices and Criteria Clusters" in the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis.
How to conduct a negotiation using AHP
Luis Vargas In this workshop we will try to show you how to conduct a negotiation using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. This approach is an extension of the "Getting to Yes" approach where parties do not see each other as adversaries, but as teams looking for a fair and equitable solution to the conflict. The workshop will address the following concepts:
What is a negotiation?
Dimensions of a negotiation
The concept of a tradeoff
How to evaluate a tradeoff
Gain/loss ratios of tradeoffs. When is a tradeoff fair and equitable?
An agreement as a conglomerate of fair and equitable tradeoffs
Implementation of a fair agreement.
The workshop will use some well-known negotiation situations, not necessarily conflict resolution negotiations, to illustrate the different steps of the process.
Short Bio
PhD in Mathematics, University of Sevilla (Spain)
Luis Vargas was the recipient of the Juan March Foundation Scholarship, Madrid, Spain, to the University of Pennsylvania in 1976-78. He won the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business in 1984. He was the coordinator of the Quantitative Interest Group from 1987 to 1991; the coordinator of the Artificial Intelligence Interest Group from 1991 to 1994; and chair of the Second International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, held in Pittsburgh August 11-14, 1991, at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Area Director of Decision, Operations and Information Technology 2009-2012.
Luis Vargas has focused his research on decision theory, practical applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), artificial intelligence in manufacturing, the use of artificial intelligence techniques for scheduling, measurement of resource utilization, group decision making, Bayesian networks, and forecasting.
How to improve your chance of getting your AHP/ANP paper published
Enrique Mu This workshop is aimed at scholars in the early or middle phase of their professional careers who are interested in getting their AHP/ANP papers published. It focuses, in particular, on AHP/ANP applications. These applications, per se, are usually hard to publish. Based on the lecturer's experience as author, editor and reviewer of many of these application papers, some practical suggestions will be given to the participants.
Short Bio
PhD, University of Pittsburgh, Business Administration
Enrique has been the co-director of Carlow's MBA program since 2008. He is also editor-in-chief and founder of the International Journal for the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the former program director for the MBA/MIS degree at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. An accomplished scholar and business executive, Enrique was previously in charge of sales and marketing distribution operations in Latin America for a U.S.-based global data communication corporation. He is the co-author of many peer-reviewed articles that have appeared in journals such as the Latin American Research Review and the Journal of Information Technology Management. His current research interest is multicriteria decision-making frameworks for assessment of eyewitness identification.
The how and whys of ANP row sensitivity
William J. Adams After an ANP model is created and yields synthesized values for the alternatives we would like to understand how the structure of the model effects the results of the model. In traditional AHP models we can use sensitivity to increase or decrease the importance of a given node and see how the alternatives change. By using ANP row sensitivity we can perform a similar analysis on ANP models.
In this workshop you will learn how to use ANP row sensitivity and what calculations hide behind the results. You will learn how to calculate step-by-step ANP row sensitivity using either an Excel spreadsheet or Super Decisions. Even more important, you will see how to interpret the ANP row sensitivity results and how to use them to evaluate the model and the results.
Short Bio
Dr. Adams is currently the Director of Algorithms of Decision Lens. He holds a PhD in Algegraic Geometry, and has 20 years experience in designing mathematical software. He designed and implemented SuperDecisions for the Creative Decisions Foundation.
Specialities: linear and non-linear optimization, AHP and ANP theory, genetic algorithms, machine learning techniques, mathematical modeling.
Benefits-Opportunities-Costs and Risks calculations demystified
Elena Rokou A full BOCR analysis is in some ways like a SWOT analysis, where not only the strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) of an organization are taken into consideration but also its opportunities (O) and threats (T). Similarly, in an ANP BOCR analysis we have the expected benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks of a decision.
In this workshop we will see what questions to ask to define the strategic criteria, control criteria and sub-nets. We will focus on how we gather the local results and synthesize them in a bottom-up approach to get the final results. We will talk about the meaning of the multiplicative formula and the additive/negative and when to use each of them.
Short Bio
Dr Elena Rokou is the Chief Research Officer at Creative Decisions Foundation, the AHP/ANP research institute funded by Dr Thomas Saaty. She holds a PhD degree in the field of operational research, focusing on project scheduling and evolutionary algorithms from the National Technical University of Athens, Mechanical Engineering School, Sector of Industrial Management and Operational Research, a MSc in Management Engineering and a Software Engineering Diploma. Her main research interests cover project scheduling, optimization, evolutionary algorithms, MCDA and decision support tools.
Specialties: project scheduling, optimization algorithms, ANP and group decision making
Meeting Facilitation
Daniel Saaty To support effective group decision making, it is necessary to foster a productive collaborative environment. This session will focus on meeting facilitation tools designed to enable groups to efficiently and effectively collaborate towards making decisions with AHP and ANP. Tools such as an agenda, meeting objective, ground rules, a parking lot, and a clear definition of consensus enable a facilitator to keep teams engaged and focused as they work through building AHP and ANP decision models. Participants will be provided with descriptions of these tools and how they apply to support creating and managing decision frameworks for teams.
Short Bio
Dan is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of Decision Lens. He has advised numerous Fortune 500 organizations and government agencies in mission-critical decisions – from multi-billion dollar strategic planning processes to decision management methodologies for major capital investments, portfolio management decision processes, and acquisition and best-value source selections. An expert in the implementation of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP), Mr. Saaty has over 15 years of experience in developing and implementing advanced decision methodologies. Mr. Saaty's skill in decision process design and facilitation is widely sought after by companies and government agencies including Johnson and Johnson, Amtrak, the NFL, National Grid, Joint Chiefs of Staff, US Department of Defense, NASA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Military Health System among others. The advanced decision methodologies designed and implemented by Mr. Saaty are routinely used in both the public and private sectors to prioritize mission-critical objectives, site selection, best-value source selection, enterprise risk management, human resource management, work effort prioritization, and engineering trade-off analysis decisions.
