Challenges in multicriteria decision methods

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding or Analysis (MCDA) are fields of study that have their roots in Operational Research (OR) and the modelling of the decision process with multiple criteria (or multi-attributes) therein (Roy, 1996; Polmerol & Barba-Romero, 2000; Belton & Stewart, 2002; Figueira et al., 2016). The acronym MCDM/A is used to represent a number of approaches associated with MCDM and MCDA, that is, decision making, decision aiding and decision analysis (de Almeida et al., 2015a). MCDM/A involves a wide range of methods that establish the preference structure of the Decision-Maker (DM), analyse the environment of the DM and evaluate alternatives (Roy, 1996; Belton & Stewart, 2002), thereby aiming to find the most preferred alternative while considering several, but normally contradictory, points of view. It does so by building mathematical models that are rational and efficient (Vincke, 1992). These methods aim to give a better understanding of how the DM thinks of decision situations (Keeney & Raiffa, 1976; Belton & Stewart, 2002; de Almeida et al., 2015a; Figueira et al., 2016).