The Characteristic Objects Method: A New Distance‐based Approach to Multicriteria Decision‐making Problems

Abstract Multicriteria decision‐making (MCDM) methods are concerned with the ranking of alternatives based on expert judgements made using a number of criteria. In the MCDM field, the distance‐based approach is one popular method for obtaining a final ranking. The technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) is a commonly used example of this kind of MCDM method. The TOPSIS ranks the alternatives with respect to their geometric distance from the positive and negative ideal solutions. Unfortunately, two reference points are often insufficient, especially for nonlinear problems. As a consequence of this situation, the final result ranking is prone to errors, including the rank reversals phenomenon. This study proposes a new distance‐based MCDM method: the characteristic objects method. In this approach, the preferences of each alternative are obtained on the basis of the distance from the nearest characteristic objects and their values. For this purpose, we have determined the domain and Fuzzy number set for all the considered criteria. The characteristic objects are obtained as the combination of the crisp values of all the Fuzzy numbers. The preference values of all the characteristic object are determined on the basis of the tournament method and the principle of indifference. Finally, the Fuzzy model is constructed and is used to calculate preference values of the alternatives, making it a multicriteria model that is free of rank reversal. The numerical example is used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method with respect to results from the TOPSIS method. The characteristic objects method results are more realistic than the TOPSIS results. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.