Research Issues in Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): The Impact of Uncertainty in Solution Evaluation

We consider Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) as the conjunction of three components: search, preference tradeoffs, and interactive visualization. The first MCDM component is the search process over the space of possible solutions to identify the nondominated solutions that compose the Pareto set. The second component is the preference tradeoff process to select a single solution (or a small subset of solutions) from the Pareto set. The third component is the interactive visualization process to embed the decision-maker in the solution refinement and selection loop. We focus on the intersection of these three components and we highlight some research challenges, representing gaps in the intersection. We introduce a requirement framework to compare most MCDM problems, their solutions, and analyze their performances. We focus on the impact of uncertainty in each of these components and illustrate it with a real-world application.