A SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS APPROACH FOR SOME DETERMINISTIC MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING METHODS

Often, data in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems are impr ecise and changeable. Therefore, an important step in many application s of MCDM is to perform a sensitivity analysis on the input data. This paper presents a methodology for performing a sensitivity analysis on the weights of the decision criteria and the performance values of th e alternatives expressed in terms of the decision criteria. The propos ed methodology is demonstrated on three widely used decision methods. These methods are the weighted sum model (WSM), the weighted product m odel (WPM), and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This paper forma lizes a number of important issues on sensitivity analysis and derives some critical theoretical results. Also, a number of illustrative exa mples and computational experiments further illustrate the application of the proposed methodology.