MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING

Interest is growing in multicriteria decision making (MCDM) techniques and a large number of these techniques are now available. The purpose of this tutorial is to give a theoretical description of some of the MCDM techniques. Besides this we will give an overview of the differences and similarities of the techniques discussed. We have tried to select those techniques that are most frequently described in recent publications on analytical chemical and pharmaceutical subjects and, more important, that give a good survey of the diversity of techniques. We describe five different MCDM methods: Pareto optimality, desirability functions, overlay plots, utility functions and PROMETHEE. These techniques are compared to each other by applying them to a decision making problem in tablet manufacturing.