MCDA stands for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. It is a way to make decisions by considering many things that are important, or criteria, all at once.
Imagine you are trying to decide what to have for dinner. There are many things to consider, such as taste, cost, time to cook, and healthiness. All of these factors are important to you, so you need to consider them all together to make the best decision.
MCDA helps you do this by organizing all of the criteria into a chart or table. Each criterion, like taste or cost, gets its own column. Then, you can list all of the possible options for dinner in rows.
Next, you assign weights to each of the criteria based on how important it is to you. For example, if being healthy is very important, you might give that criterion a higher weight than the others.
Then, you score each option for each criterion. For taste, you might give pizza a 10/10, but for healthiness, you might only give it a 4/10.
Finally, you multiply the scores by the weights and add them up for each option. This gives you a total score for each option, which helps you decide what to choose.
So, MCDA is a way to help make complex decisions by organizing the many important criteria and weighing them according to their importance to you.