Multiobjective Q-analysis with concordance and discordance concepts (Q1061607)

A multicriterion decision-making (MCDM) technique with possibly nonnumerical criteria, called Multicriteria Q-Analysis I (MCQA-I), developed earlier on the basis of only a concordance analysis, is extended to include a measure of discordance. This new version, labeled MCQA-II, reduces an MCDM problem to the tradeoff between three conflicting indices calculated for each project or alternative. These indices are respectively a value or utility-type index ''psi'', and two outranking indices ''pdi'' and ''pci''. The example of selecting a project to alleviate pollution problems in the lower San Francisco Bay area illustrates the application of both versions of MCQA. A sensitivity analysis performed on the slicing-level set tends to show that MCQA-II leads to a more stable ranking than MCQA-I; in either case, application of the technique leads to selection of the project preferred in practice.