Abstract

GARCIA ALCARAZ, Jorge Luis  and  NORIEGA MORALES, Salvador Anacleto. Multicriteria and multiatribute evaluation of farms and tractors: a model and a case of study. Agric. Téc. Méx [online]. 2008, vol.34, n.4, pp.397-405. ISSN 0568-2517.

Traditionally, the investments on farm's technology are justified using economic analysis, butthistype oftechniques only use economic factors omitting qualitative factors; however, farm equipment technology have different attributes that characterize it. The objective is to illustrate an evaluation model for choosing farms tractors with a multicriteria and multiattribute focus, which takes into consideration a set of objective and subjective attributes, and a decision group realizes the evaluation. For the determination of the main attributes that must be integrated in the model, a questionnaire was elaborated and applied to farmers and tractors salesman, who indicated the level of importance they assign to some attributes in the decision making process in the purchasing of a tractor. The questionnaire included twenty main attributes; nevertheless by using a factorial analysis it was determined that only seven of these represented the variability of the investment process. The model is based on TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution), where every available tractor was characterized through those seven attributes, where the higher values generate an ideal alternative and the lower values an anti-ideal alternative, selecting the alternative that has the smaller Euclidian distance to the ideal alternative and the larger distance to the anti-ideal alternative. The model was tested with a case of study in Colima, Mexico in June 2005 and was considered efficient by the decision group that utilized it.

Keywords : advanced farm's technology; investment in farm's technology; TOPSIS.

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