Development of R&D project selection model and web-based R&D project selection system using hybrid data envelopment analysis and analytical hierarchy process model

Some issues which should be considered in an R&D project selection problem are as follows: First, quantitative analysis on the efficiencies of R&D projects is required to guarantee objective validity in the evaluation of the projects. For this reason, the methodology for selecting R&D projects should be based on mathematical models that perform quantitative analysis. Second, in general there are ordinal factors like Likert-scale in the data for evaluating R&D projects. Previous researches, however, couldn't suggest explicit methods incorporating these ordinal factors into models. Third, for the R&D project selection problems with limited resources like budget, it is necessary to decide the perfect ranking of all the projects. This paper develops a mathematical model that can be applicable to the problems of selecting R&D projects with the previous features. In this paper, we improve the original DEA model for evaluating efficiency to incorporate ordinal factors and suggest a new model which can decide the perfect ranking of all projects by merging the improved DEA model and AHP method. Furthermore a web-based R&D project selection system using the DEA/AHP model suggested in this paper is developed and illustrated.