BRAW: Block-wise Rating the Attribute Weights in MADM

Abstract

In Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) context, knowing the weights of the criteria (attributes) is a very important question. Various methods can be employed to give an appropriate value to the weights of the criteria. In a branch of the methods, Decision Maker (DM) does a trade-off between the criteria levels in the mind and gives his/her judgments on the rates or priorities of the alternatives. Such methods have a strong axiomatic foundation, but however the amount of work is often cumbersome and time-consuming. In such a way, the purpose of this paper is to present an easy and sound new trade-off method, entitled Block-wise Rating the Attribute Weights (BRAW). Briefly, in this method, the DM considers a system (named block) including two hypothetical alternatives and two criteria, and expresses his/her willingness to choose one alternative between two. Then the DM’s judgments on different blocks are used to infer the criteria weights. The main contribution of this research, in addition to the block-wise judgments, is an innovative idea for involving the indifference threshold concept at the BRAW procedure. In order to illustrate the capabilities and applicability of the proposed method, the BRAW is tested on some numerical examples. Additionally, the method validation is performed by comparing the BRAW method with the other relevant methods. The result shows several advantages of the proposed method in relation to the existing methods. We believe that employing the proposed method helps the DMs of any company in most effective and efficient manner dealing with his real-world MADM problems.