Ranking-Theory Methods for Solving Multicriteria Decision-Making Problems

• Published in: Advances in Operations Research Vol. 2019; no. 2019; pp. 1 - 7
• Main Author: Gogodze, Joseph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cairo, Egypt Hindawi Publishing Corporation 01.01.2019; Hindawi; John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subjects: Alternatives; Analysis; Athletes; Decision making; Decision theory; Equality; Materials selection; Methods; Multiple criteria decision making; Multiple criterion; Operations research; Optimization; Pareto efficiency; Pareto optimum; Ranking; Ratings & rankings; Theory; Iran
• ISSN: 1687-9147; 1687-9155
• DOI: 10.1155/2019/3217949

The Pareto optimality is a widely used concept for the multicriteria decision-making problems. However, this concept has a significant drawback—the set of Pareto optimal alternatives usually is large. Correspondingly, the problem of choosing a specific Pareto optimal alternative for the decision implementation is arising. This study proposes a new approach to select an “appropriate” alternative from the set of Pareto optimal alternatives. The proposed approach is based on ranking-theory methods used for ranking participants in sports tournaments. In the framework of the proposed approach, we build a special score matrix for a given multicriteria problem, which allows the use of the mentioned ranking methods and to choose the corresponding best-ranked alternative from the Pareto set as a solution of the problem. The proposed approach is particularly useful when no decision-making authority is available, or when the relative importance of various criteria has not been evaluated previously. The proposed approach is tested on an example of a materials-selection problem for a sailboat mast.