Decision support by interval SMART/SWING – methods to incorporate uncertainty into multiattribute analysis

Interval judgments are a way of handling preferential and informational uncertainty in multicriteria decision analysis. In this paper, we study the use of intervals in SMART and SWING weighting methods. We generalize the methods in three ways: (i) the reference attribute is allowed to be any attribute, not just the most or least important one, (ii) the decision maker can reply with intervals to the weight ratio questions to account for his/her judgmental uncertainty, (iii) the reference attribute can also be given as an interval to describe, e.g. the ambiguity of the attribute. We address practical and procedural matters implied by the use of minimum number of judgments in the weight ratio elicitation. Computer support can be used to make the weighting process visual and interactive. We describe the WINPRE software for interval SMART/SWING, PAIRS and preference programming. The use of interval SMART/SWING is illustrated by a job selection example.