Incremental analysis for generalized TODIM

This study aims to generalize TODIM to eliminate two types of scaling effects by incremental analysis. One effect is due to an inappropriate presentation of the losses part in S-shaped value function in traditional TODIM, in which the criteria with smaller weights will contribute larger dominance values in its computing process. The other effect is derived from aggregating partial dominance measurements among heterogeneous criteria in traditional TODIM (a Portuguese acronym of Interactive and Multi-criteria Decision Making). The proposed approach firstly divides the criteria into two categories, benefits and costs, each of which is manipulated separately so as to facilitate incremental analysis. For each category, the pairwise dominance of one alternative is accumulated and normalized to represent the global dominance of each alternative. The global dominance measurements of alternatives in both categories are then combined according to benefit-cost ratio in order to rank alternatives. In addition, sensitivity analyses on the parameters of the gains/losses value function and the cutoff benefit-cost ratio demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model. An example of the selection of fuel buses is illustrated, and shows that our model is feasible and effective for MCDM problems with risk preference.