Comparison among multi-criteria decision analysis techniques: a novel method

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method of comparison among the various multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques. The motivation behind proposing novel method of comparison comes from the fact that in spite of the presence of significant number of MCDA techniques, decision makers face difficulty in selecting appropriate MCDA technique for a particular problem under study. The reason behind this is that the applications of different MCDA techniques may result in different sets of rankings for the same problem. Such dilemma makes it difficult for the decision makers to identify the most appropriate ranking and thus the most appropriate MCDA technique for their problem. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes to emphasize on the performance of the obtained rankings so as to identify the most appropriate ranking. Thus, the proposed performance-based comparison method is based on the performance of the obtained rankings. A total of fourteen different MCDA techniques have been compared for the purpose. These methods have been applied to a case study so as to get the rankings of the alternatives. The proposed method is applied on these obtained rankings so as to identify the most effective ranking among them, for the problem at hand. The comparison with the help of the case study establishes the effectiveness of the proposed method of comparison among MCDA techniques.