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Using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique to rank alternatives is a well-known area of study in which aggregation operators, such as ordered weighted averaging (OWA) and induced OWA (IOWA) operators, play an important role in merging information and producing an overall ranking. The distance measures from ideal argument values in aggregation operators have gained attention in recent literature. Distance measures are traditionally used as argument variables, which leads to the depiction that the attribute cannot be aggregated directly. In this paper, a generalized form of distance-induced OWA (DIOWA) operators is proposed with distance measures used as order-inducing variables. A distinctive benefit of DIOWA operators is that they permit us to consider ideal argument values while simultaneously also taking the attribute values as argument variables. Three variants of DIOWA operators are proposed and investigated, namely a) the Hamming distance-induced OWA (HDIOWA) operator, b) the normalized Hamming distance-induced OWA (NHDIOWA) operator, and c) the weighted Hamming distance-induced OWA (WHDIOWA) operator. We highlight their important properties and provide proofs to necessary theorems, and also suggest the determination methods for calculating their associated weights. We discuss further extensions of the proposed DIOWA operators with the help of generalized and quasi-arithmetic means. We discuss the use of our proposed family of operators for two different decision making situations, and demonstrate their validity by an illustrative numerical example. Finally, we apply the proposed operators to a real-life problem of ranking Chinese provinces for their science and technology (S&T) development levels. The proposed operators are shown to be a useful addition to the aggregation toolbox for decision analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A new decision-making methodology called Simulated Uncertainty Range Evaluations (SURE) for handling uncertainty is proposed. • A real-world case study for a pharmaceutical company is used to test the methodology. • Only SURE correctly identified the alternative eventually chosen by the company. Abstract Managerial decision-making often involves the consideration of multiple criteria with high levels of uncertainty. Multi-attribute utility theory, a primary method proposed for decision-making under uncertainty, has been repeatedly shown to be difficult to use in practice. This paper presents a novel approach termed Simulated Uncertainty Range Evaluations (SURE) to aid decision makers in the presence of high levels of uncertainty. SURE has evolved from an existing method that has been applied extensively in the pharmaceutical and speciality chemical sectors involving uncertain decisions in whole process design. The new method utilises simulations based upon triangular distributions to create a plot which visualises the preferences and overlapping uncertainties of decision alternatives. It facilitates decision-makers to visualise the not-so-obvious uncertainties of decision alternatives. In a real-world case study for a large pharmaceutical company, SURE was compared to other widely-used methods for decision-making and was the only method that correctly identified the alternative eventually chosen by the company. The case study demonstrates that SURE can perform better than other existing methods for decision-making involving multiple criteria and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods have been extensively used in energy planning, their descriptive use has been rarely considered. In this paper, we add an evolutionary description phase as an extension to the AHP (analytic hierarchy process) method that helps policy makers to gain insights into their decision problems. The proposed extension has been implemented in an open-source software that allows the users to visualize the difference of opinions within a decision process, and also the evolution of preferences over time. The method was tested in a two-phase experiment to understand the evolution of opinions on energy sources. Participants were asked to provide their preferences for different energy sources for the next twenty years for the United Kingdom. They were first asked to compare the options intuitively without using any structured approach, and then were given three months to compare the same set of options after collecting detailed information on the technical, economic, environmental and social impacts created by each of the selected energy sources. The proposed visualization method allow us to quickly discover the preference directions, and also the changes in their preferences from first to second phase. The proposed tool can help policy makers in better understanding of the energy planning problems that will lead us towards better planning and decisions in the energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]