Perspectives on Some Widely Used Methods of Multi-Objective Decision Making in Systems Engineering

摘要

This paper reflects on some widely used methods of decision making in both public and private enterprises. We examine (i) The "Min-Max Regret" criterion; (ii) Majority votes over a subset of the attributes; and (iii) the "Weight and Rate" method of ranking alternatives and assigning scores. For each of these methods we provide an example based on a real life situation to illustrate the main drawbacks. The purpose is to highlight some of the normative issues with these widely used methods and to provide some documentation in the literature that could be referred to as a precaution when these methods are incorporated.