A Process for Determining Priorities and Weights for Large-Scale Linear Goal Programmes

Many planning models can be formulated as large-scale linear goal-programming problems in which the analyst and user must establish thousands of objective-function weights that reflect the priorities of the many goals. How to select such weights so as to have the resulting optimal solution be a suitable compromise solution is the main focus of this paper. We first describe the problem setting that gave rise to the need, here military personnel planning, and then a process by which a set of goal priorities and objective-function weights can be developed using Saaty's analytic hierarchy process.