3 - A survey on links between multiple objective decision making and data envelopment analysis

Abstract

The two well-known methodologies in operations research and management science are data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). Over the last years, some analogies between DEA and MCDM methodologies have been discussed in a large body of research. These two methodologies are integrated to provide the effective approaches to overcome some difficulties of each other. The first DEA researchers, Charnes and Cooper, worked on MCDM before presenting DEA. They introduced the DEA methodology based on their own MCDM knowledge. Also, they combined these two methodologies in the first published paper in the DEA context without referring directly to the relationship between them. There exist a wide range of studies regarding the application of the MCDM concepts in the DEA methodology and vice versa, but none of them pay attention to classification of the relationship between these two methodologies. On the grounds that MCDM is divided in the two subsets, multiple objective decision making (MODM) and multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methodologies, these relationships can be considered in the four situations, the relationships between MODM and DEA and vice versa and the relationships between MADM and DEA and vice versa. However, the focus of this investigation is only on links between DEA and MODM, and then, the robust presented papers in these fields are reviewed.