A Review and Comparative Analysis of Methods for Determining Criteria Weights in MCDM Tasks

Abstract

To select optimal solutions in multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, many practical approaches have been developed. In almost all of these approaches, it is necessary to assess the importance of individual criteria for decision makers. Subjective assessments of importance are transformed into numerical assessments of decision weights by applying appropriate computational procedures. A large number of methods for determining the weights of the criteria have been proposed. These methods differ in their operating principles and in the calculation procedures underlying each method. The paper presents the most well-known methods and provides a brief comparative analysis.

Keywords

• criteria weights
• multicriteria decision making
• ordinal comparison of criteria
• relative importance of criteria
• relative quantitative comparison of criteria