Interactive Construction of Criterion Relations for Multi-criteria Decision Making

Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is a category of techniques for solving decision making problems based on the performance of multiple criteria. One shortcoming of the existing MCDM techniques is that they rarely consider the relations among decision criteria. Nevertheless, different types of criterion relations significantly impact the results of the decision making problem. In this paper, we solve this problem by establishing and measuring different types of relations among decision criteria. We propose a MCDM framework, named InterDM, to rank a set of alternatives based on the utilities of both singleton criteria and criterion coalitions, in which we design an Interactive Interpretive Structural Modeling technique to construct consistent criterion relations. We use a case study of ranking cloud services to demonstrate the efficiency of InterDM.