Members of the UR-WISE project team participated in the 28th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM 2026), hosted by the University of Wuppertal in Germany under the theme “Better Decisions for a Better Tomorrow.”
Recognised as one of the leading international conferences in the field of multicriteria decision analysis and decision support systems, MCDM 2026 brought together researchers and practitioners working on advanced analytical approaches for addressing complex societal, economic, and environmental challenges. The conference programme covered a wide range of topics, including Data Envelopment Analysis, decision support systems, policy analytics, preference modelling, and practical applications of multicriteria decision-making methods.
Within this international scientific framework, Ivana Marjanović, member of the UR-WISE team from the Faculty of Economics, University of Niš, presented the research: “Policy Analytics for Urban Wellbeing: Integrating Stakeholder Preferences into an Outranking-Based Decision Dashboard for Cities.”
The research addresses the growing complexity of urban policymaking, where decision-makers must balance competing priorities such as mobility, housing, environmental quality, and governance. The study proposes a policy-analytics framework that combines structured urban indicators with stakeholder preferences in order to support more transparent and interpretable decision-making processes for local authorities. Using harmonised survey instruments, the approach integrates the priorities of different stakeholder groups into an outranking-based multicriteria decision-making model. The methodology enables the construction of domain-specific city profiles and comparative urban assessments while preserving non-compensatory logic — ensuring that weak performance in essential policy areas cannot simply be compensated by strengths elsewhere.
The presented approach contributes to advancing policy analytics for urban wellbeing by offering a replicable model for integrating stakeholder preferences into multicriteria decision-making systems tailored to public policy contexts. It also demonstrates how multicriteria analytical tools can be translated into actionable policy insights and communication-ready evidence for local and regional decision-makers.
Participation in MCDM 2026 further strengthens the international visibility of UR-WISE research in the fields of policy analytics, urban wellbeing, and evidence-based decision-making. It also reinforces the project’s interdisciplinary orientation, connecting urban and regional development research with advanced analytical methodologies and decision-support approaches.