UTA methods. (English) Zbl 1072.90547

Siskos, Yannis; Grigoroudis, Evangelos; Matsatsinis, Nikolaos F.

Figueira, José (ed.) et al., Multiple criteria decision analysis. State of the art surveys. New York, NY: Springer (ISBN 0-387-23067-X/hbk). International Series in Operations Research & Management Science 78, 297-343 (2005).

Summary: UTA methods refer to the philosophy of assessing a set of value or utility functions, assuming the axiomatic basis of MAUT and adopting the preference disaggregation principle. UTA methodology uses linear programming techniques in order to optimally infer additive value/utility functions, so that these functions are as consistent as possible with the global decision-maker’s preferences (inference principle). The main objective of this chapter is to analytically present the UTA method and its variants and to summarize the progress made in this field. The historical background and the philosophy of the aggregation-disaggregation approach are firstly given. The detailed presentation of the basic UTA algorithm is presented, including discussion on the stability and sensitivity analyses. Several variants of the UTA method, which incorporate different forms of optimality criteria, are also discussed. The implementation of the UTA methods is illustrated by a general overview of UTA-based DSSs, as well as real-world decision-making applications. Finally, several potential future research developments are discussed.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1060.90002].

MSC:

90B50	Management decision making, including multiple objectives
91B16	Utility theory