A novel summarization technique for the support of resolving multi-criteria decision making problems

In real-life circumstances, managers often have to face various decision-making problems. Among them, the topic of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is one of the most important and complicated problems in the decision-making field. In general, the element of MCDM can consist of three parts: input output, and the solution approach. The input is expressed as m alternatives with n criteria. It usually assumes that the underlying input data can be represented in a decision table. Correspondingly, the output is an optimal outcome, or a set of outcomes, resolved by different kinds of solution approaches. In this study, we propose a summarization technique to display the decision table as a new summarization table; allowing managers to make decisions more quickly. The proposed technique is to optimize a summarization result so that the degree of information lost is minimum. Since seeking for a minimum result is an NP-hard problem, we applied a genetic algorithm to improve the summarization result. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.