Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis via Ratio and Difference Judgement

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-14

3. Smart, Direct Rating

   Pages 15-52

4. The AHP, Pairwise Comparisons

   Pages 53-92

5. Scale Sensitivity and Rank Preservation

   Pages 93-117

6. The Alternatives in Perspective

   Pages 119-138

7. Group Decision Making

   Pages 139-160

8. Resource Allocation

   Pages 161-193

9. Scenario Analysis

   Pages 195-210

10. Conflict Analysis and Negotiations

    Pages 211-227

11. Multi-Objective Linear Programming

    Pages 229-257

12. MCDA in the Hands of Its Masters

    Pages 259-270

13. Prospects of MCDA

    Pages 271-279

14. Back Matter

    Pages 281-287

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The point of departure in the present book is that the decision makers, involved in the evaluation of alternatives under conflicting criteria, express their preferential judgement by estimating ratios of subjective values or differences of the corresponding logarithms, the so-called grades. Three MCDA methods are studied in detail: the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique SMART, as well as the Additive and the Multiplicative AHP, both pairwise-comparison methods which do not suffer from the well-known shortcomings of the original Analytic Hierarchy Process. Context-related preference modelling on the basis of psycho-physical research in visual perception and motor skills is extensively discussed in the introductory chapters. Thereafter many extensions of the ideas are presented via case studies in university administration, health care, environmental assessment, budget allocation, and energy planning at the national and the European level. The issues under consideration are: group decision making with inhomogeneous power distributions, the search for a compromise solution, resource allocation and fair distributions, scenario analysis in long-term planning, conflict analysis via the pairwise comparison of concessions, and multi-objective optimization. The final chapters are devoted to the fortunes of MCDA in the hands of its designers. The research started in the late seventies, when I got involved in three different problems: the nomination procedures in a university, the evaluation of alternative energy-research proposals, and the evaluation of non-linear programming software.

• calculus
• linear optimization
• modeling
• multi-objective optimization
• negotiations
• optimization
• programming

• Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

  Freerk A. Lootsma

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