DON’T LEAVE YOUR DECISIONS TO CHANCE!

In every period of life, people encounter some problems and search for solutions. The problems encountered are among many alternatives and depend on more than one criterion. This situation puts the decision maker into a difficult decision process. Before moving on to the decision-making process, let’s talk about the definition of the decision problem. A decision is the most appropriate response to a situation. Decision making is simply choosing the most appropriate one among many alternatives.

Decision is a general expression of the choices that people make among the alternatives they face every moment. Decision can also be defined as “the permanent allocation of the scarce resources at our disposal in a real life problem”.

In the most general sense, a decision-making problem can be defined as the selection of the most appropriate option from a set of options according to at least one objective or criterion.

Researches show that it’s enough to make many daily decisions intuitively, however it is not sufficient for complex and crucial decisions. In the 1960s, multi-criteria decision-making methods began to be developed with the necessity of some tools to assist in decision-making processes.

The basic steps of decision analysis are; defining the problem, listing all possible options, listing all possible events offered by nature that is not under the control of decision-making, creating a decision table showing the results that each option will achieve for each event, selecting a decision model (according to the state of nature), applying the model, and selecting an option.

The choices made in all areas of life determine people’s lives. Each choice leads to at least one alternative to be abandoned. According to the alternatives, the right choices benefit people, while the wrong choices make people pay a cost or price in various ways. Multi-criteria decision analysis has emerged in parallel with this situation in order to evaluate alternatives.

One of the main objectives of the multi-criteria decision analysis approach is to help organize and synthesize such information that decision-makers feel comfortable and confident in making a decision, to ensure satisfaction when all criteria and factors are taken into account and to minimize potential post-decision regret. Multi-criteria decision making involves determining the optimum alternative among multiple, conflicting and interactive criteria. The theory and method of multi-criteria decision making solves complex problems encountered in business, engineering and other areas of human activity.

Often in complex decision-making problems there are situations of incommensurability and incomparability between alternatives. While one alternative is superior to another alternative in one criterion, the fact that it is not superior to another alternative in another criterion are problems that we encounter in daily life. MCDM techniques provide additional approaches for such problems and help the decision-maker with various techniques to solve these situations.

MCDM techniques began to be developed in the 1960s when a number of tools to assist decision-making were deemed necessary. The decision-making process will be difficult in cases where many parameters determine the target to be achieved in the election and each of the alternatives to be evaluated for the selection has its own advantages. In such cases, the person who will make the decision will either reach a decision to get rid of all this indecision problem, regardless of whether he is healthy or not, or he will reach a decision in doubt at the end of long and irrational analyzes. The purpose of using MCMD techniques is to keep the decision-making mechanism under control in cases where the number of alternatives and criteria is high and to obtain the decision result as easily and quickly as possible.

The MCMD techniques are used to find the most appropriate solution among the alternatives. Therefore, the main purpose of evaluating alternatives can be listed as follows;

- Choosing the best alternative among the alternatives,

- Ranking of all alternatives,

- Classification of alternatives according to specific criteria,

- Determination of subsets within the alternatives found appropriate

Many methods have been developed in the field of MCMD. These techniques have some advantages over each other. One

of the problems that the decision-maker may encounter when starting the solution is to determine which method is the most appropriate method. When determining the most appropriate method, the decision-maker should look at the structure of the problem and the characteristics of the process. In MCMD, all problems have more than one criterion and the relevant criteria are determined for each problem set. Although there are hundreds of factors to be considered for the decision, the decision-maker can accept the most important ones as criteria. The decision-maker will evaluate the alternatives available in meeting the needs under the presence of determined comparative criteria and determine the most suitable alternative for him in three stages. The first stage is to determine the criteria and to rank the importance of these criteria according to each other. The second stage is to determine the extent to which the alternatives satisfy these criteria and to reach the final evaluation of each alternative over all the criteria. The final stage is to choose the alternative with the highest score.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques are techniques that allow alternatives to be evaluated, sorted and selected according to multiple criteria set by customers. Examples of commonly used of these techniques include AHP, TOPSIS, VIKOR, PROMETHEE, and ELECTRE.

In the same decision problem for each person, the level of importance of decision criteria and judgments in the evaluation of decision options may differ. In solving such decision problems, the analytic hierarchy process can provide more effective decision-making. When more than one goal is important to decision makers, AHP is the most appropriate method by which decision makers help make decisions and a process in which the person tries to make decisions in an organized way.Based on mathematics and psychology, AHP was first proposed by Myers and Alpert in 1968 and developed as a model by Professor Thomas Lorie Saaty in 1977 and made available for solving decision-making problems.

TOPSIS, developed by Hwang and Yoon in 1981, is based on the selection of the shortest distance alternatives from the positive ideal solution and the farthest distance alternatives from the negative ideal solution. Positive ideal solution; it is a combination of all the best achievable criteria. The negative ideal solution consists of the worst achievable benchmark values. The only assumption in this method is that each criterion has a one-way utility that either increases monotonously or decreases monotonously.

ELECTRE (Elemination and Choice Translating Reality English) method is a multi-criteria decision-making method first proposed by Beneyoun in 1966. The method compares two alternatives at the same time using binary comparisons and uses an exclusion relationship to eliminate alternatives that are affected by others . At the same time, this method determines a measure of efficiency and importance for each criterion. Each option is graded based on the assigned efficiency measures. In particular, the decision maker must set limits of compliance and non-compliance.

PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Encrichment Evaluations) method is a multi-criteria decision making technique developed by J.P. Brans in 1982. The PROMETHEE method has been developed based on the difficulties of the current prioritization methods in the literature in the implementation phase and has been used in some studies on supply management until today.

VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) method was developed for the optimization of complex multi-criteria systems. The compromise solution, introduced by Trajkovic, Amakumovic and Opricovic in 1997, means reaching an agreement with a common consensus on a decision-making problem with conflicting criteria and providing the most appropriate alternative solution to the ideal. This method focuses on sequencing and selecting a number of alternatives and identifies conciliatory solutions for a problem with contradictory criteria that help the decision maker reach the final decision.

Assuming that the alternatives are evaluated according to each criterion, the consensus ranking is performed by comparing the ideal solution proximity measure. Over the past decade, VIKOR has become a more popular decision support tool in addressing multi-criteria and alternative real-life problems.

The number of Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods is quite high and a new method is emerging every day. While there are so many techniques and methods that will allow us to reach the results closest to the optimum in decision making, I say let’s not leave our decisions to chance.

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