AN EXTREME-POINT APPROACH FOR OBTAINING WEIGHTED RATINGS IN QUALITATIVE MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING

Many attempts have been made in the past to obtain estimates for the w eights and ratings values of a multicriteria linear utility function. In particular, the problem arises when both criteria importance and al ternatives' ratings are expressed in a qualitative ordinal manner. Thi s article proposes an extreme-point approach for obtaining the overall ratings in the presence of ordinal preferences both for the criteria importance and the alternatives' rankings. In particular it is shown t hat Borda's method of scores is obtained as a special case. (C) 1996 J ohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.