Interactive Preference Optimization for University Administrators

This paper describes a long-range planning procedure for administrators in private universities. The procedure operates by generating a sequence of alternative future configurations of the university that satisfy several financial constraints and by helping an administrator to assess his preferences on them. A mathematical programming algorithm is used to structure the interactive identification/search procedure. It incorporates the strategy of restriction and linear programming methods to generate new configurations, and it relies upon the interactively assessed preferences of the administrator to guide the search process rather than a standard objective function.