Methodology for Determining Stakeholders' Criteria Weights in Systems Engineering

Multi criteria decision making involves evaluation of various alternative solutions upon a set of criteria. The result of multi criteria decision making is the best alternative which secures the highest score with the predefined criteria. Usually, these criteria are weighted in an order to represent their stake in the final selection. In multi criteria decision making this step is very critical for the selection of the right product. Often these criteria are traced backed to a set of multi-disciplinary stakeholders participating in the evaluation process. Often these stakeholders differ upon their weighting of a particular criteria with other stakeholders. In this paper we provide a holistic criteria weighting method which allows to assimilate the different criteria weights from different stakeholders to provide a single set of criteria weights, uniformly acceptable by all stakeholders. This paper shows how the criteria weights can be simulated and used priorly to find the design solutions. The simulations results can be used to accept or refute the particular design alternative.