Multicriteria decision making (mcdm): a framework for research and applications

Abstract

We view Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) as the conjunction of three components: search, preference tradeoffs, and interactive visualization. The first MCDM component is the search process over the space of possible solutions to identify the non-dominated solutions that compose the Pareto set. The second component is the preference tradeoff process to select a single solution (or a small subset of solutions) from the Pareto set. The third component is the interactive visualization process to embed the decisionmaker in the solution refinement and selection loop. We focus on the intersection of these three components and we highlight some research challenges, representing gaps in the intersection. We introduce a requirement framework to compare most MCDM problems, their solutions, and analyze their performances. We focus on two research challenges and illustrate them with three case studies in electric power management, financial portfolio rebalancing, and air traffic planning.