A review of goal programming and its applications

This paper presents a review of the current literature on the branch of multi-criteria decision modelling known as Goal Programming (GP). The result of our indepth investigations of the two main GP methods, lexicographic and weighted GP together with their distinct application areas is reported. Some guidelines to the scope of GP as an application tool are given and methods of determining which problem areas are best suited to the different GP approaches are proposed. The correlation between the method of assigning weights and priorities and the standard of the results is also ascertained.