ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses various solution techniques for decision opportunities involving no risk or uncertainty, multiple objectives, and only a few alternatives. It also discusses techniques that allow for the elimination of alternatives without the use of any preference information. The chapter presents concepts associated with preference structures and various types of preference information. Nominal scales are qualitative in nature and are basically only used to classify objects, such as biological species and languages. In order to make inferences about a decision maker’s (DM) preference structure, information about the DM’s preference structure must be provided. One approach for ranking multiobjective outcomes, which requires very little information from the DM, is lexicographic ordering. With lexicographic ordering therefore, the DM will first rank the attributes in their order of importance. Lexicographic ordering is a relatively simple approach to the ranking of multiobjective outcomes, but it rarely represents the way that a DM would trade off among the various objectives of a problem.
