Two industrial deployments of multi-criteria decision-making systems at General Electric are reviewed from the perspective of their multi-criteria decision-making component similarities and differences. The motivation is to present a framework for multi-criteria decision-making system development and deployment. The first deployment is a financial portfolio management system that integrates hybrid multi-objective optimization and interactive Pareto frontier decision-making techniques to optimally allocate financial assets while considering multiple measures of return and risk, and numerous regulatory constraints. The second deployment is a power plant management system that integrates predictive modeling based on neural networks, optimization based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, and automated decision-making based on Pareto frontier techniques. The integrated approach, embedded in a real-time plant optimization and control software environment dynamically optimizes emissions and efficiency while simultaneously meeting load demands and other operational constraints in a complex real-world power plant

Over the past two decades, model predictive control and decision-making strategies have established themselves as powerful methods for optimally managing the behavior of complex dynamic industrial systems and processes. This paper presents a novel model-based multi-objective optimization and decision-making approach to model-predictive decision-making. The approach integrates predictive modeling based on neural networks, optimization based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, and decision-making based on Pareto frontier techniques. The predictive models are adaptive, and continually update themselves to reflect with high fidelity the gradually changing underlying system dynamics. The integrated approach, embedded in a real-time plant optimization and control software environment has been deployed to dynamically optimize emissions and efficiency while simultaneously meeting load demands and other operational constraints in a complex real-world power plant. While this approach is described in the context of power plants, the method is adaptable to a wide variety of industrial process control and management applications