Developing a Permutation Method Using Tabu Search Algorithm: A Case Study of Ranking Some Countries of West Asia and North Africa Based on Important Development Criteria

The recent years have witnessed an increasing attention to the methods of multiple attribute decision making in solving the problems of the real world due to their shorter time of calculation and easy application. One of these methods is the ‘permutation method’ which has a strong logic in connection with ranking issues, but when the number of alternatives increases, solving problems through this method becomes NP-hard. So, meta-heuristic algorithm based on Tabu search is used to find optimum or near optimum solutions at a reasonable computational time for large size problems. This research is an attempt to apply the ‘permutation method’ to rank some countries of the West Asia and the North Africa based on the development criteria. Knowing the situation of each country as compared with other countries, particularly the respective neighbouring countries, is one of the most important standards for the assessment of performance and planning for the future activities.