A proposed method for modeling research and development (R&D) project prioritization criteria

Organizations of different types, sizes and purposes often face situations which compete amongst themselves for the allocation of resources. In view of such circumstances, this work aimed at verifying the contribution of multicriteria decision aid (MDA) as a tool to enable the establishment of an analytical structure capable of supporting the decision-making process of research and development (R&D) project prioritization in an organization of Brazilian aerospace sector. Thus, this work has proposed a method for modeling project prioritization criteria with the referred nature, in which concepts and methods that are part of the constructivist approach for MDA are put into practice, with the aim of contributing to the solution of the problem initially described. The proposed method makes use of existing methods and techniques found in the literature, such as cognitive mapping and measuring attractiveness by a categorical based evaluation technique (MACBETH) method, which were here particularized for use in the highlighted problem. The development of a decision maker´s cognitive map, combined with the use of MACBETH method for modeling the preferences of that decision maker, allowed to verify the adequacy of the joint employment of those tools for structuring R&D project prioritization problems, where complexity, given the multitude of criteria, has acted as main characteristic.