TODIM based method to process heterogeneous information

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problems are getting increasingly difficult over the years. Nowadays, it is very common to have a problem where heterogeneous types of information must be processed before making a decision. From a wide variety of MCDM methods, just a few of them are able to process mixed types of information at the same time and most of these methods relies on transformations that may cause problems and/or be unjustified. In this paper we bring a modular interpretation of the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for Interative Multi-criteria Decision Making) method to handle heterogeneous data types simultaneously, in a systematic way. We argue that the method have a modular capacity which is the novelty of our approach. Using this interpretation, the whole problem with heterogeneous information is broken into modules and processed in a straightforward way. Two examples are used to illustrate the approach showing the effectiveness and practicability. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.