Compromise principle based methods of identifying capacities in the framework of multicriteria decision analysis

Abstract The basic aim of the compromise principle employed in this paper is to seek the capacity by which each alternative has a relatively equal chance to reach as close as possible to its highest reachable overall evaluation. According to the compromise principle, three types of capacity identification methods – the simple arithmetic average based compromise method, the least squares based compromise method and the linear programming based compromise method – are proposed. The input information required for the compromise principle based identification methods consists of the preference information with respect to the decision criteria and the partial evaluations of the alternatives provided by the decision maker. An illustrative example is given to show the processes of the proposed methods, and a comparison analysis with the maximum entropy principle based identification method is also presented.