MATHEMATICS FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND EVALUATION

The course aims to provide some tools that will allow you to become familiar with quantitative methods and their use in decision-making issues, including those related to cultural organisations. The course adopts an approach oriented not only to the description of theoretical aspects but also to the applications for practical cases.

The course allows students to acquire knowledge of quantitative methodologies and to apply these concepts to formulate and solve some decision problems under certainty, uncertainty and risk, together with multicriteria problems and financial project evaluation, First lessons will be devoted to the introduction to Decision Making and pre-requirements.
Knowledge and understanding: understanding the meaning of the concept of Decision Making (DM); understanding and knowledge of methodologies capable of dealing with Decision Making problems under uncertainty, risk and certainty. Qualitative description of DM and some model about. Introduction to Multi Criteria problems (normalization, aggregation), and some MCDA methods WA, GA, AHP, and other). Knowledge and understanding of multi-objective problems.
Application of knowledge and understanding: be able to solve decision-making problems that may also affect cultural organisations; be able to formulate and solve some decision making problems.

During the course it is assumed that students already know some mathematical subjects covered in secondary school courses, in particular the knowledge of elementary functions, properties their graphic representation; derivatives and optimization; knowledge of vectors and matrices

1. Decision Making (DM) and Problem Solving. Decision under certainty, uncertainty, risk. Some DM models, in particular the Rational model and its steps.

2. Decision under uncertainty; some models (EV, Maximin, Maximax, OWA,...); decision under risk: EU, SEU, decision trees.

4. Project evaluation. Discount rate. Elements of cost-benefit analysis.

5. Decision Making under certainty. Multicriteria and Multi objective Decision. Multicriteria analysis; MAVT approach and some algorithms (WA, GA). The AHP methodology.

6. Multi objective: elements of linear programming.

Other optional arguments will be eventually considered,

Slides and other material from the Teacher will be furnished during the lessos

OTHER MATERIAL (for consultation):

Cournejols G., Trick M., Quantitative Methods for the Management Sciences, Course Notes, Carnagie Mellon, Pittsburgh, 1999.

Forman E.H., Selly M.A., Decision by objectives (How to convince others that you are right)", World Scientific, 2001.

Decision Making, Giacomo Bonanno, http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bonanno/DM_Book.html (open access book)

The preparation is checked by means of a written proof, including exercises and description/discussion of some of the arguments introduced. Oral test will be optional.

The course is divided into 30 hours of frontal lessons in which theoretical concepts regarding the methodologies covered by the course are presented, as well as concrete applications to decision-making problems.

English

Detailed information on the program and study materials will be communicated at the beginning of the course on e-learning page (www.moodle.unive.it).

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development