Abstract
A decision support method for two or more pre-defined criteria and two or more profiles is disclosed. Each criterion comprises two or more pre-defined and ordinally ranked categories and each profile comprises a set of two or more of the criteria. Each criterion in the set is associated with one of the categories for that criterion, and where ordinal pairwise rankings of undominated profile pairs have already been received from a decision-maker. Each undominated profile pair comprises two profiles with one profile having a higher ranked category on at least one criterion and a lower ranked category on at least one other criterion than the other profile, having thereby enabled the calculation of a point value for each of the categories on the criteria and a total score for each of the profiles. Each total score comprises the sum of the corresponding point values. The method comprises including ratio scale measurements of the decision-maker’s preferences with respect to the relative importance to the decision-maker of some or all of the categories on the criteria relative to others as well as, optionally, values obtained from the decision-maker to enable the point values for the categories on the criteria and/or the total scores for the profiles to be linearly scaled in order to identify their respective points of zero value. The method also comprises solving a system of equalities/inequalities that represents the ordinal pairwise rankings of undominated profile pairs already received from the decision-maker and the ratio scale measurements of the decision-maker’s preferences with respect to the relative importance to the decision-maker of some or all of the categories on the criteria relative to others as well as, if they are optionally included, the values obtained from the decision-maker to enable the point values for the categories on the criteria and/or the total scores for the profiles to be linearly scaled in order to identify their respective points of zero value to obtain at least one output.