Cognitive Best Worst Method for Multiattribute Decision-Making

Abstract EN

Pairwise comparison based multiattribute decision-making (MADM) methods are widely used and studied in recent years.

However, the perception and cognition towards the semantic representation for the linguistic rating scale and the way in which the pairwise comparisons are executed are still open to discuss.

The commonly used ratio scale is likely to produce misapplications and the matrix based comparison style needs too many comparisons and is not able to guarantee the consistency of the matrix when the number of objects involved is large.

This research proposes a new MADM method CBWM (Cognitive Best Worst Method) which adopts interval scale to represent the pairwise difference and only compares each object to the best object and the worst object rather than all the other objects.

CBWM is a vector based method which only needs 2n-3 pairwise comparisons and is more likely to generate consistent comparisons and reliable results.

The theoretical analysis and a real world application demonstrate the effectiveness of CBWM.