J.F. Otte
Beslissingsprocedures voor de operations research.
Literature survey,
Report 93.3.TT.4096, Transport Engineering and Logistics.
In the operations research field a number of techniques available for choosing
the best alternative from a set. Most of these decision making techniques
involve giving all alternatives a numerical grade. This process brings forth
two problems.
Firstly, in some cases only a human assessment (semantical) is possible. This
must be transformed into a numerical grade to make comparison and combination
possible. If all alternatives in the problem considerd can be compared
(relative assessment), the Analytic Hierarchy Process, or the multiplicative
variant of that method, can be used to calculate the numerical grade. In most
applications in the operations research field, however, only absolute
assessments are possible, in which case the AHP (absolute) or the direct rating
technique should be used. In stationary situations it is possible to calculate
the numerical grades just once, after which the decision maker only needs to
choose one of the semantical evaluations.
The second problem is the multi criteria analysis. The alternatives are
assessed for their performance with regard to several criteria. Some procedure
combine the evaluations to form one final, numerical grade, and other MCA
procedures determine a preference preorder of all the alternatives. The most
common technique is to calculate the sum of the assessments, with weights for
the criteria. To determine the criteria weights, one can use the AHP or the MAV
function. The outranking and interactive techniques are useful in some
situations, but are not suitable for application in operations research.
To further illustrate the decision process, the best techniques have been
applied in two case studies concerning a railterminal.
Reports on Transport Engineering and Logistics (in Dutch)
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