Extended lexicographic goal programming: a unifying approach

This article starts reviewing the satisficing philosophy of Goal Programming (GP) and interpreting their solutions from the point of view of the utility theory. This interpretation leads to a very general optimisation structure called Extended Lexicographic Goal Programming (ELGP). It is then demonstrated that there are a significant number of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approaches that, from a logical point of view, can be reduced to the ELGP structure. The paper ends assessing the theoretical and practical advantages of the proposed unified approach.