Comparison of three modern multicriteria decision-making tools

The requirements, conditions and values encompassing a decision-making situation determine the decision maker's feasible alternative solutions and circumscribe the best solution. Various approaches have been suggested in the literature to identify the best solution for a class of problems called multicriteria decision making (MCDM). MCDM problems may be deterministic or non-deterministic. These approaches employ different methodologies and usually produce dissimilar solutions. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine and compare the available MCDM methods. This paper focuses mainly on deterministic MCDM situations and methods and only a brief reference is made to their non-deterministic counterparts. We introduce a new performance measurement method called operational competitiveness rating (OCRA) and discuss its use as a deterministic MCDM tool. We demonstrate OCRA's application to a process selection problem that is adapted from an actual situation that involves qualitative data. We compare the results obtained by OCRA with the results of analytic hierarchy process and data envelopment analysis to understand their similarities and differences. The comparison of these three non-parametric performance measurement tools provides some useful insights into their behaviour in actual MCDM situations.