How to allocate funds within the army

An interactive decision support system is proposed to aid decision making in material procurement in the Finnish Defence Forces. The system provides the decision maker with graphical information on the difference between a desired level of effectiveness and the level which will be attained in any particular resource allocation. As criteria for the allocations, we use weights for each military province, indicating the effectiveness resulting from any of their particular defense plans. Our solution procedure for the problem consists of three components: generating and screening alternatives, for which an algorithm is proposed; multi-objective reference point optimization among selected alternatives, employing minimization of a scalarizing function; and display of alternative solutions in numerical and graphical form. Our system is a prototype which has been introduced to the military authorities responsible for resource allocation.