Supportive software for the multi-criteria decision making

The MCA8 supportive software is described in this paper. This software application was developed mainly for the purpose of the support of multi-criteria decision making in the field of electrical power engineering. The MCA8 software runs on Windows with .NET framework and it is very user-friendly. The MCA8 offers six methods of multi-criteria analysis (MCA) for solving extensive multi-criteria decision making tasks. These methods are WSA, IPA, TOPSIS, AGREPREF, CDA and PROMETHEE. The impulse for the development of own application was the effort to obtain own tool that could be flexibly adapted to our needs. The resulting application is to serve as a simple tool for comfortable work with decision making tasks, i.e. for comfortable data input, easy calculation, visual presentation of results, and their export into various formats. The resulting application is independent of a platform - in this case, not the portability between the operating systems of the Windows and Unix families, but rather the installation both on PC and on expanding PDA and MDA pocket computers. With respect to the technological facilities of our Department (but also common user), the Microsoft .NET technology has been chosen. The NET framework 2.0, has been used for the MCA8 software application. The MCA8 is suitable not only for electrical power engineering, where has been used in the field of electrical distribution networks for selecting the most suitable places for instalation of modern remote-controlled section switches. The utilization of these switches causes acceleration in handling and thus shortening of duration of a fault in the electrical networks. This results in rising of probability of faultless service and thus the reliability of electrical energy supply.