Visual PROMETHEE in Assessing Forest Management Plans
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Abstract
Multi-criteria methods and decision support systems are widely used in forestry and natural resources management. Most commonly applied multi-criteria methods are Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), PROMETHEE, SMART, ELECTRE and VIKOR. Some of them have software that fully implements their methodologies. This paper presents how forest management plans can be efficiently assessed with PROMETHEE method and its software support – Visual PROMETHEE. As a case study example we have analyzed four forest management plans for the National park Fruška gora in Serbia. Forest plans have been evaluated with respect to given criteria set and the final result provided the final ranking of management plans and the overall performance of each plan (with respect to criteria set). Paper describes the procedure of processing real case study examples with help of Visual PROMETHEE and suggests guidelines for future applications of this software in similar cases when multi-criteria analysis represents the only acceptable approach.
Keywords: forest management plan, multi-criteria analysis, PROMETHEE, Visual PROMETHEE