Track: Operations Research

Abstract

The South African social system suffers from a history of imbalance, and with the advent of democracy, effort is deliberately made to close the social and manpower gap created as a result. The National Research Foundation (NRF) is saddled with the responsibility of funding research programme and developing new generation of researchers amongst its other mandates. In achieving this mandate, they are constrained to operate within the objective of the government in using all the country’s instrument of development to redress this historic social imbalance in order to create a more equitable society.

The NRF, therefore, seeks a funding model that can serve as a steering mechanism to achieve the current mandatory policy goals of the organisation to accommodate the systemic needs and also respond to a highly dynamic research and innovation environment while closing the historic manpower gap. These principles and challenges should be addressed within the framework of a new resource allocation model and an associated policy formulated by the NRF to reach its goals to deliver particularly within the constraint of fund availability. In addition to this, there are various types of funding and their possible applications within which the administration of funds must be made without violating funding constraint requirements.

This paper presents an integrated two stage multi-criteria model that is an attempt to meet this challenge of the NRF. An Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) model embedded in a Goal Program was developed, in which the conflicting multi-objective goals of the NRF was modelled within the limits of fund availability. The AHP model prioritises the objectives of the NRF and weights the different relevant metrics of the priorities. These weights were used as inputs into the Goal program that seeks to allocate funds based on the relative importance of the objectives as reflected in their metric weights. The last objective created was the fund availability, which is used as the lever to evaluate diverse scenarios based on the possibility of syndicating funds in order to achieve the stated objectives within the funding constraints.

The model was implemented using Microsoft Excel in order to engender the understanding within the executives of the NRF, after which an expanded model that could handle a lot more number of variables and constraints was proposed using R. The solution shows what the NRF needs to do to achieve their diverse strategic goals, and how they may make strategic sacrifices if the constraints become stronger than initially anticipated and resources become sparser. In addition, the model demonstrated that the Foundation was able to achieve the previous years’ targets with less resources if it had been implemented earlier, with the savings ploughed into some other areas of need.