A Critical Review of Popular Multi-criteria Decision Making Methodlogies

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a powerful quantitative measurement method in the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) area. It has been used in banks, manufacturing systems, organizational performance evaluation, and project selection. Despite this widespread usage, many studies argue that rank reversal phenomenon is unpreventable when any AHP method is applied. This paper presents that the rank reversal occurs in other popular MCDM approaches as well, such as Borda-Kendall (BK), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), and the simple additive weighting (SAW) approaches. For avoiding rank reversal phenomenon in decision matrices where such reversals should not take place, this paper attempts to illustrate that the proposed least common multiple (LCM) approach successfully addresses these rank reversal problems in most popular MCDM approaches in decision support systems area.