Supporting rural telecommunications: A compromise solutions approach

Optimum acceptability of telecommunications networks: a multi-criteria approach

“…Each candidate hub is evaluated according to j -1,2, ..., m criteria/acceptability indicators. In the case of a rural telecommunications network, as recommended by the Federation of American Scientists, (see Lee et al 1996) the possible acceptability indicators to be applied to each candidate hub are: economic activity, population, construction and operation costs, education, transportation, etc.…”

“…3 An illustrative example A case study, reported by Lee et al (1996), will be used to demonstrate the operation as well as the suitability of the proposed index. The purpose of this example is to design a telecommunications network in the state of Nebraska, where 24 candidate hubs (cities) are considered.…”

“…The indicators are as follows: Economic activity, population, budget, health care, education and transportation. Lee et al (1996) arrived at an optimum telecommunications design by formulating and solving a 0/1 goal programming model. We are going to apply the methodology proposed in this paper to rank the 24 candidate hubs according to the value achieved by the aggregated index of acceptability given for the expression (6).…”

“…On the other hand, the relative importance attached to each indicator of acceptability by the decision maker was elicited by Lee et al (1996) applying Dominant Eigenvector Method (EVM) to the square matrix A: (ay) of order six, obtained by pairwise comparison of the six acceptability indicators considered (see Lee et al 1996, p. 41), given for: Table 1 Values of acceptability indicators achieved by each candidate hub. (see Lee et al 1996, p. 41 Different rankings of selection can be obtained by applying the aggregated index of acceptability given by expression (6) to the above data.…”

“…This problem has been successfully addressed by reformulating the mathematical programming model commented above as a binary goal programming. Lee et al (1996) pioneered work in this direction (see Lee et al 1994) where a similar methodology is applied to an analogous problem consisting of the design of a files system).…”