MULTICRITERIA AND SOCIAL CHOICE METHODS IN AGRICULTURE, WATER MANAGEMENT AND FORESTRY

Numerous research studies worldwide have shown that weak optimization and multi-criteria analysis may help decision- makers to easily formulate, develop and judge alternative solutions and actions, perform risk analyses, and produce a wide range of unbiased soft solutions, easy to handle and evaluate before application. In solving decision problems in group contexts, it is shown that social choice theory methods can also be efficiently used to enable the voting of participants. Moreover, voting methods can be combined with multi-criteria methods (adapted for group applications) and provide comparable solutions in the search for the most appropriate. The paper presents several examples of using advanced systems analysis techniques and decision-making tools in agriculture-water-forestry-related studies in Serbia, particularly in searching for 'best solutions' in complex individual and group scenarios. A brief overview of solved problems is presented for selecting cattle food suppliers, evaluating walnut cultivars, evaluating the importance of criteria for risk assessments of Ramsar protected wet areas, prediction of water quality, and detecting causality relations and importance of criteria used in assessments of water management plans and sustainable forestry goals.