Issue Section:
Guest Editorial
Engineering design decisions often require the generation and comparison of design alternatives in an environment of multiple design criteria. To aid in such decision-making, designers turn to mathematical formalisms to assist in ranking the alternatives. A very popular approach to ranking alternatives against a set of n criteria is the weighted sum method (WSM). Popularity of the WSM method derives mainly from its intuitively compelling form and ease of use. It commonly takes the form where the rating of the jth alternative, Rj, is the sum of criteria (or attribute) measures, qij, times weights, wi > 0, applied to each measure. The overwhelming preponderance of the more recent literature treats wi as an importance measure of each criterion, and although not necessary, it is also common to impose the...
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