Multi-choice best-worst multi-criteria decision-making method and its applications

The best-worst method (BWM) is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach for solving several types of real-life decision-making problems. The basic BWM determines the priority order by pairwise comparisons of the best and worst criteria. The strength of the preference assigned via numerical value for linguistic interpretations of relative comparisons ranges from 1 to 9, representing preferences among the criterion. However, the amount of strength is entirely dependent on the choice of the decision-makers. Though expert's opinions may differ due to various reasons such as incomplete information, lack of knowledge, ambiguity in linguistic terms, and so forth. Therefore, it is highly likely that the expert may provide multiple viewpoints for the preferences values. Thus, this study proposes a novel extension of the BWM named the multi-choice best-worst method (MCBWM), dealing with the concept of multiple choices of preference relations to compare the criterion. The MCBWM overcomes the limitation of BWM, where the pairwise preferences in the comparisons are multi-choice parameters rather than single parametric values. Multiple real-world MCDM applications are illustrated in experimental studies to show the quality, performance, and applicability of our proposed MCBWM. A detailed comparative analysis of the proposed approach has been done with the well-known existing decision-making techniques and their optimal results are compared. The proposed method offers a new direction for the MCDM approaches for solving real-life problems.