Since the farm financial crisis of the 1980s, Farm Credit System banks continue to merge and consolidate to enhance competitiveness. Two mixed-integer programming models of AgChoice Agricultural Credit Association (ACA), a recently merged ACA in Pennsylvania, were developed to determine the optimal number, location, and territory of branches. The approach suggests useful information can be determined regarding the reconfiguration process after bank mergers, especially given the fact that the current AgChoice ACA configuration is available for comparison purposes.

The paper focuses on multi-criteria problems. It presents the interactive compromise hypersphere method with sensitivity analysis as a decision tool in multi-objective programming problems. The method is based on finding a hypersphere (in the criteria space) which is closest to the set of chosen nondominated solutions. The proposed modifications of the compromise hypersphere method are based on using various metrics and analyzing their influence on the original method. Applications of the proposed method are presented in four multi-criteria problems: the assignment problem, the knapsack problem, the project management problem and the manufacturing problem.

The VIKOR method was introduced as a Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) method to solve discrete decision-making problems with incommensurable and conflicting criteria. This method focuses on ranking and selecting from a set of alternatives based on the particular measure of “closeness” to the “ideal” solution. The multi-criteria measure for compromise ranking is developed from the l–p metric used as an aggregating function in a compromise programming method. In this paper, the VIKOR method is extended to solve Multi-Objective Large-Scale Non-Linear Programming (MOLSNLP) problems with block angular structure. In the proposed approach, the Y-dimensional objective space is reduced into a one-dimensional space by applying the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition algorithm as well as extending the concepts of VIKOR method for decision-making in continues environment. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate and clarify the main results developed in this paper.