Incorporation of Poverty Principles into Goal Programming

This paper presents a methodology for the incorporation of poverty related concepts into the goal programming paradigm. The concepts of poverty line, absolute poverty and relative poverty are discussed in the context of their potential usage in the field of Operations Research. The synergy between goal programming and poverty lines is examined. Two additional meta-goals are proposed for inclusion in a meta-goal programming framework based around absolute and relative poverty respectively. The resulting poverty incorporating meta-goal programming model is compared against other goal programming variants over a test set of school budget allocation models. The results demonstrate how the incorporation of poverty principles allows for greater modelling flexibility in the goal programming framework. This in turn allows decision makers to avoid solutions that are below threshold levels for a subset of stakeholders in either a relative or absolute sense. Appropriate conclusions and suggestions for future research are given.