ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the basic procedures proposed in the literature, classifying them within the main reference field where they have been developed, that is, statistics and operations research. It present a approach for the problem of ranking several multivariate normal populations that controls the risk of false ranking classification under the hypothesis of population homogeneity while under the nonhomogeneity alternatives it is expected that the true rank can be estimated with satisfactory accuracy, especially for the ‘best’ populations. The necessity and usefulness of defining an appropriate ranking of several populations of interest, that is, processes, products, services, teaching courses, degree programs and so on are very commonly recognized within many areas of applied research such as chemistry, material sciences, engineering, business, education, biomedicine and so forth. Often the populations of interest are multivariate in nature, meaning that many of their aspects can be simultaneously observed on the same unit/ subject.
