## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
Multi-criteria assessment is an assessment and decision-making tool that is widely applied in different spheres of the private and public sectors, such as groundwater quality classification [47], tourism [48], energy policy [49], urban land use efficiency evaluation [50], transportation [51], and others. When applying each of these methods, an important step is to identify a set of relevant indicators and quantify their importance [52; 53]. We identified four key indicators that can generally and complexly reflect the current situation of the assessed subjects; i.e., municipalities (and based on the specialist literature mentioned in Section 3.2). A homogenous group of 32 municipalities in the Czech Republic (see Section 3.1) was assessed. The intention was to demonstrate the importance of selecting suitable indicators for assessing the financial health of municipalities or the effectiveness of their management, which directly determined the results of the overall assessment. We can outline the following conclusions based on the results in this study:  
* The basis of assessment is the identification of a relevant set of alternatives (a criteria matrix), which should have similar attributes across the assessed subjects to the greatest degree possible; thus, the (partial) homogeneity of the assessed set is an essential prerequisite for assessment;
* The selection of indicators that will subsequently be the subject of assessment should be subject to expert discussion or an extensive analysis of literary sources to demonstrate the justifiability of the specific criterion;
* Assessment based on a low number of indicators is insufficient, highly variable, and diverse.  
The results described above can be influenced to a specific degree by the selection of indicators and the research sample itself. Our goal was to objectivise the processes of indicator selection and processing as much as possible. Appropriate attention should be given to this step because incorrect determination directly and negatively impacts the results. Justification for using multi-criteria methods to complexly characterise the current situation was proven; these should be the primary methods used by decision-makers. Assessment based on a small number of subjective criteria can provide only partial information. This subsequently eliminates the application of such criteria within the terms of multi-criteria analysis to a specific degree. Therefore, we recommend using  
Figure 6: Jaccard index of individual results with results from variant D1 by variant (**a**) and time (**b**).  
more indicators (at least four), thereby allowing evaluations to be more comprehensive and objective. Further research will focus on applications with a greater number of indicators to assess the differences. We also intend to apply different MCDM methods to generalise the results achieved.  
Conceptualisation, R.V.; methodology, R.V.; software, R.V.; validation, R.V.; formal analysis, R.V.; investigation, R.V., J.B., V.P. and P.G.; resources, R.V.; data curation, R.V., J.B., V.P. and J.M.; writing--original draft preparation, R.V.; writing--review and editing. R.V.; visualisation, R.V.; supervision, R.V.; project administration, R.V. and J.B.; funding acquisition, R.V and J.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the Student Grant Competition in VSB--Technical University of Ostrava, grant number SP 2021/18\" and by the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, grant numbers VEGA 1/0578/18\", VEGA 1/0407/18\".  
Publicly available datasets were analysed in this study. These data can be found here: (Available online: [[https://monitor.stantipokladna.cz/](https://monitor.stantipokladna.cz/)]([https://monitor.stantipokladna.cz/](https://monitor.stantipokladna.cz/)) (accessed on 15 November 2020)).  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.