CROSS: A Multicriteria Group-Decision-Making Model for Evaluating and Prioritizing Advanced-Technology Projects at NASA

Evaluating and prioritizing advanced-technology projects is a particularly difficult task for the staff at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) shuttle project engineering office. Because the evaluation process is complex and unstructured, decision makers (DMs) must consider vast amounts of diverse information concerning safety, systems engineering, cost savings, process enhancement, reliability, and implementation. Intuitive methods developed in the past have helped them to use large volumes of information in evaluating projects. However, these intuitive methods do not provide a structured framework for systematic evaluation. CROSS (consensus-ranking organizational-support system) is a multicriteria group-decision-making model that I implemented successfully at KSC to capture the DMs’ beliefs through sequential, rational, and analytical processes. CROSS uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), subjective probabilities, the entropy concept, and the maximize-agreement heuristic (MAH) to enhance the DMs’ intuition in evaluating sets of projects. (Government: programs. Decision analysis: multiple criteria.)