On the Similarities of Some Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Methods

Since multiple criteria characterise many practical decision problems, the research field of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is flourishing. This paper compares the multi-attribute decision making (MADM) methods, simple additive rating (SAR), simple additive weighting (SAW) as well as the outranking approach PROMETHEE and explains their similarities. We present a case study on industrial paint application and provide theoretical evidence that PROMETHEE can mimic other MADM algorithms. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.