Fusion of BWM and AHP MCDM Methods to Choose the Most Suitable Secondary School for an Individual in the Context of Bangladesh

Abstract

Choosing the best schools from a group of schools is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, we have represented a method that uses the fusion of two multi-criteria decision-making methods, Best–Worst Method (BWM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to rank some of the user preferred alternatives. The system considers the choice of the user and the quality of the alternatives to rank them. User preferences on the criteria are taken as inputs in the form of best–worst comparison vectors to measure the choice of the user. These values are applied to calculate the numeric weights of each of the criteria. These weights reflect the preference of the user. A dataset of secondary schools in Bangladesh has been compiled and used for automatic quantitative pairwise comparison on the alternatives to calculate the score of each alternative in every criterion, which reflects its quality in that criterion. These scores are calculated using AHP. The weights of the criteria as well as the scores of these alternatives in those criteria are then used to calculate the final score of the alternatives and to rank them accordingly. An extensive experimental analysis and comparative study is reported at the end of this paper.