Decisionaker - Personal multiple criteria decision maker

Decisionaker is Personal Multiple-criteria decision-maker suitable for daily use by both managers and private users. In the case of making decision among several options where there are multiple decision aspects, Decisionaker greatly simplifies such choices along with the best option identification. Everyone can make right decisions the similar way how the consulting companies do that for their clients.

The decision making process is really simple. At the beginning the decision criteria are defined. Every aspect to be considered as a part of a decision making process is defined as a criterion. The typical decision criteria include a price, costs, weight, size, etc. as well as qualitative aspects defined by the person making decision. There individual scales like 0 – 5, 0 – 10 or other scales for the value of an individual aspect can be used. In the fact it just describes the order of values for such particular aspect. For example when making decision among multiple digital cameras the lenses on someone’s preferences can be ranked like fixed focal length non removable (1), variable focal length removable (2), fixed focal length removable (3), variable focal length removable (4). Such decision criteria can be used to compare among various camera types including compacts and DSLRs.
There are available 3 different decision criteria types. The criterion type affects the method, how the final decision is calculated. These include rational scales, interval scales and
ordinal scales.

For each individual criterion scale it is necessary do define whether the criterion is maximizing or minimizing its values. When criterion maximizes its values, it means that the option with higher value is best than the one with lower value. In the case of the profit, the related decision criterion is maximizing. However in the case of the purchase price or costs, the decision criterion is maximizing.

As the decision criteria are determined, it is also necessary to assign their importance for a making decision. It strongly depends on decision making priorities of a particular person making decision. The following criterion importance can be assigned: not important, less important, important, more important and very important.

After decision criteria set is defined, there can be defined the variants among which the decision shall be made. For each decision variant the values for each of decision criterion is assigned. Decisionaker calculates the final decision recommendation which orders decision variants from the best down to the worst one. It also states relative percentage of decision quality of each decision variant compared to the best decision variant.
In the case that the differences of relative percentage for the best decision variants are small, the decision criteria should be refined and the decision can be repeated with improved criteria set.

Decisionaker supports three decision methods:
the global criterion method – this is suitable for the interval scale and rational scale criteria,
the weighted order position method – this is suitable for ordinal scale criteria,
the combined method – it is suitable for mixed criteria set, it combines two separate calculations using other two method for appropriate criteria set.