Today in class we worked through an example of MCDM. In the example Isabelle was trying to decide what cell phone plan to choose. The first step was to identify the criteria and measures. Her criteria were cost and other important factors. Her measures were monthly service charge, number of minutes per month, minimum length of the contract, whether there is unlimited texting, and quality of service. Then she rated them using continuous or categorical measures. The next step is to collect all of the necessary data, and the range of each measure.
After this, all of the measures must be rescaled into a common unit. For this they must be converted using a proportional scale. This scale is between is between zero and one. Zero will always be the worst, and one will always be the best.
After the measures are rescaled, each of the categories can be either totaled or averaged to see which cell phone plan will be the best match. Before a final decision can be made though, the categories must be ranked in order of importance. Isabelle's parents first ranked the categories one through five. Then they put them on a scale of zero to one hundred.
The next step is to total all of the 0-100 rankings. Then to calculate the weight, each ranking is divided by the total. All of the weights should add up to equal one. Next, multiply the weight by the original common unit score, and add the categories up to get a total score.
Finally, the strengths and weaknesses must be determined for the top two options, and then a final decision can be made.
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