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Top1. Introduction
The project portfolio selection problem has been discussed for decades by many researchers in the fields of project management, financial management, risk management, and investment (Jafarzadeh et al., 2015; Péreza et al., 2018). It is a complex decision-making process, partially due to the existence of multiple and often conflicting objectives, and partially due to the high number of projects from which a subset or a portfolio is chosen (Khalili-Damghani et al., 2013).
In countries where national development planning is centralized and administered by the state, and where government entities are asked to suggest projects that would lead to the improvement of the of the country's position in relation to a set of global indices that would also lead to the improvement of the objectives of the national plan's vision, selecting an optimum portfolio of the suggested projects that would lead to a certain level of improvement in these indices becomes a challenging problem.
In this paper, the project portfolio selection problem is addressed at a national level, within a development planning environment, using Kuwait's Mid-Range Development Plan 2015/2016–2019/2020 as a case. And when dealing with national projects, two sets of activities are identified. There are those that deal the evaluation of each project in terms of their efficiency; effectiveness; broad developmental impact; and sustainability, including cost and benefits analysis, economic analysis, and risk assessment analysis, (etc.). Second, there are those related to the selection of a portfolio of projects to be included in the developmental plan. Figure 1 is a block diagram representing these two sets of activities as a two-stage interrelated process: a project evaluation stage and a project portfolio selection. The focus of this paper is on Stage II, where the output from Stage I, which is the main input to Stage II, is already specified and estimated.