A Comparative Study on Decision Making Methods with Interval Data

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) models are used to solve a number of decision making problems universally. Most of these methods require the use of integers as input data. However, there are problems which have indeterminate values or data intervals which need to be analysed. In order to solve problems with interval data, many methods have been reported. Through this study an attempt has been made to compare and analyse the popular decision making tools for interval data problems. Namely, I-TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), DI-TOPSIS, cross entropy, and interval VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimiza-cija I Kompromisno Resenje) have been compared and a novel algorithm has been proposed. The new algorithm makes use of basic TOPSIS technique to overcome the limitations of known methods. To compare the effectiveness of the various methods, an example problem has been used where selection of best material family for the capacitor application has to be made. It was observed that the proposed algorithm is able to overcome the known limitations of the previous techniques. Thus, it can be easily and efficiently applied to various decision making problems with interval data