Abstract—In multi-criteria decision making process, Decision Maker may prefer one criterion more than the others. The preferences can be reflected via the weights of the criteria. Once a decision ranking has been obtained, the Decision Maker may want to change their preferences. The change may or may not affect the current decision ranking. The smallest change in the preferences value that affects the current ranking may determine the critical criterion. To seek for the critical criterion, the sensitivity of ranking to the variety of the criteria weights is analyzed in the paper. Different methods of multi-criteria decision analyses are used for comparison, such as the trade-off ranking, relative distance method and TOPSIS.

Index Terms—Critical criterion, multi-criteria decision making, relative distance, TOPSIS, trade-off.

The authors are with School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, the University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, The United Kingdom (email: nor.jaini@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk).

Cite: Nor I. Jaini, Sergei V. Utyuzhnikov, "Critical Criterion Analysis for Multi-criteria Decision Making," International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 129-137, 2016.