A user-friendly program of human judgments in engineering decision analysis

Abstract

Engineering decision problems are characterized by a set of engineering alternatives which are evaluated with respect to a set of technical/non-technical criteria. The “importance” or “weights” of the criteria play a significant role in the decision analysis. Often experts' opinions are solicited to determine the criteria weights. This paper presents a method to find criteria weights.from expert's judgment. Theory of the method is presented and illustrated by an example. A computer program (subroutine) of the method in TURBO-PASCAL is presented in the appendix and applied to an engineering location problem from the literature. The subroutine can be easily adopted by writing a suitable main program.