EFFECTS OF HOLISTIC EVALUATIONS ON FITRADEOFF METHOD USING A SIMULATION STUDY

ABSTRACT

The Flexible and Interactive Tradeoff (FITradeoff) multicriteria method was developed under the scope of the Multiattribute Value Theory (MAVT) to elicit preferences under a partial information perspective. The flexibility of this method has been recently enhanced by the combination of two paradigms of preference modeling in the decision process, namely elicitation by decomposition (ED) and holistic evaluation (HE), improving the preferences elicitation task in a sense that fewer elicitation questions are expected to be answered by the Decision Maker (DM) to find a recommendation for the multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problem. The combination of two preference modelling paradigms in FITradeoff is an innovative characteristic on MCDM methods which deserves further analysis on its implications for the practice of decision making, not yet investigated in previous works. Considering that, this work aims to evaluate the impact of conducting HE in FITradeoff in terms of the expected reduction of the number of questions (NQ) that shall be answered to obtain the problem results. To do so, a simulation study has been carried out, in which multiple criteria problems have been generated and solved by simulating different preferences profiles. Hypotheses on the reduction of the number of questions were formulated and tested for identifying the actual effect of two different types of HE in the elicitation process: selection of the best alternative and elimination of the worst alternative considering a previously defined subset. Besides, we also analyze the relationship between the HE effects and important variables of MCDM problems such as number of criteria (NC), number of alternatives (NA), and weights distribution patterns (WD). The results obtained show that holistic evaluation judgments have a significant impact on the reduction of effort made by the DM in the elicitation process, in a sense that the total number of questions reduces in a significant manner, considering either selection tasks or elimination tasks in HE.

Keywords:
multicriteria decision making; FITradeoff method; holistic evaluation; simulation