Multicriteria Decision-Making

Real-world problems usually pose multiple considerations. It’s rare that you might face only one parameter of concern. Think about buying a car. You might be the person who just simply has to have the Porsche 911 Carrera, with the “speed yellow” coloring, no matter what the price. If you are this person, then your choice of cars is essentially a binary decision problem: either you have the car or you don’t! Maybe you could sacrifice a little and say that although you like yellow, you’d be happy with red or black, but you definitely don’t want blue or white. Then the problem becomes one of optimizing along one dimension: color. But if you’re like most people, the prospect of buying a car offers many things to think about.