Prioritization of projects in an automobile industry

This paper describes a case study about the definition of portfolio of improvement projects in an automobile industry, which had until recently been prioritized based on technical complexity and legislation criteria. Explicit alternative criteria, such as market share, new product launch time, gross margin, strategic impact, brand image, have been introduced by two means, namely, the use of an analytical hierarchic process (AHP) and of a Dempster-Shafer AHP process (DS-AHP). The first enabled the structured consideration of the fore mentioned criteria and the second allowed the introduction of subjective probabilities. Results from direct application of the methods in this specific industry are commented.