A DSS to Evaluate the Mental Workload in Vocational Training Organizations Based on the Choquet Integral

The Choquet integral is a well-founded and widely used technique for multicriteria decision making. Its versatility lies in the possibility of modeling the interactions among criteria. The applications in economics are very common, as well as those in industry and engineering, in the social and political field, in medical science. Recent applications regard the sustainability area, with particular reference to the corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility (including the outlooks determined by COVID-19 insight), and the social economics, with the consideration of non profit associations. The applications usually consist in the implementation of a decision support system (DSS) where the specific characteristics of the examined domain are deepened. Therefore, a variety of DSSs have been developed and specialized over time. Social economics is a more and more growing interest field for quantitative research, where advanced mathematical techniques are employed in order to develop DSSs, which are a novel tool in this field. The training institutions domain is strictly related to the social economics. In this chapter, a DSS for vocational training organizations based on the Choquet integral is performed. In particular, the mental workloads of the project managers (PMs) are evaluated in order to support the institution in the decisions regarding their work. The DSS incorporates the knowledge of the experts by hierarchically organizing in a decision tree the domain, in order to effectively employ the Choquet integral for the evaluation of the PMs’ workload. The results obtained in a real operational context show the effectiveness of the proposed system.