Effect of Different MCDM Techniques and Weighting Mechanisms on Women Vulnerability Index

Crime against women is a chronic issue that saddens society and needs to be carefully addressed. The states of India exhibit significant variations in the incidence of criminal behavior. We created a novel index in our previous research to determine how vulnerable Indian women are to crimes in various Indian states and union territories. The Women Vulnerability Index (WVI) assessed women's vulnerability to crime across all regions of the country. A set of alternatives is ranked using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) procedures based on a range of criteria or objectives. There are different MCDM techniques available to choose from. Also, many weighting schemes exist to assign relative importance or weight to the indicators. The task of selecting the MCDM technique for one's application is a big challenge. A bigger challenge is to select the appropriate weighting mechanism as well. This study's primary goal is to evaluate the viability and efficacy of several MCDM approaches in conjunction with various weighting systems in order to identify the Indian state with the greatest rate of crime against women. We apply different MCDM techniques on crime data to compute WVI. Also, we see the effect of using six different methods to assign weights to the factors on the values of WVI. MCDM methods are very popular these days and are being used in a lot of domains for decision making applications. Our paper will guide all such stakeholders and researchers to choose an appropriate MCDM technique and weighting method for their applications.