Characterization of methods for determination of an ordered optimal solution

In this paper, a characterization of some methods used to find an ordered optimal solution of a given system is attempted. We generalize them in the form of some theorems and suggest an approach to determine the kth best solution of a system, k ≥ 1. We also examine the computational efficiency of various approaches. The treatment proposed in this paper is general and can be applied to find the kth best solution of any given system where the set of all feasible solutions is finite.