Multiple criteria decision making: eight concepts of optimality1

Abstract

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is firmly rooted in an alternative concept of optimality where multiple (rather than single) criteria characterize the notion of “the best” (or optimal), as is prevalent in the areas of economics, engineering, management and business. These are often constrained problems where search for an optimal solution requires some form of evaluating criteria performance tradeoffs. Because there are no tradeoffs along a single criterion, optimality is an essentially multi-criteria concept. In this paper we extend and develop the notion of optimum as a balance among multiple criteria. We introduce eight different, separate and mutually irreducible optimality concepts in a classification scheme where the traditional single-objective optimality is only a special case. These eight optimality concepts provide a useful initiatory framework for the future MCDM research and applications.