No label defined (Q4945549)

The author discusses some of the principles underlying what are often called ``interactive'' methods of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), or ``progressive articulation of preferences'' in MCDM. These are methods in which the full preference structure of the decision maker is not structured and elicited a priori, but is evaluated progressively and locally in response to simple choices made by the decision maker. In such interactive methods, a number of MCDM approaches involve the following characteristic steps: (1) A feasible (and usually efficient) solution, or small number of solutions, is generated according to some specified procedure and presented to the decision maker. (2) If the decision maker is satisfied with the solution (or one of these) generated, then the process stops. Otherwise, he/she is requested to provide some local preference information in the vicinity of the solution(s) presented, such as direct comparisons between (actual or hypothetical) solutions, tradeoffs, or desired directions of improvement. (3) In the light of the local information provided, preference models are updated and/or parts of the decision space are eliminated, and the process returns to the first step. The author differentiates methods in which the responses of the decision maker are expressed in terms of tradeoffs (directly, or indirectly by choices between pairs of outcomes), or in terms of aspiration levels (i.e., desired levels of performance for each criterion). Moreover, he reports briefly on simulation studies which have been undertaken in order to access convergence properties of the interactive methods. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0928.00019].