Multiple Criteria Decision Aid

Abstract

TOPSIS is an acronym that stands for ‘Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution’ and is a pretty straightforward MCDA method. As the name implies, the method is based on finding an ideal and an anti-ideal solution and comparing the distance of each one of the alternatives to those. It was presented in Hwang and Yoon (Multiple attribute decision making: methods and applications. Springer, Berlin, 1981) and Chen and Hwang (Fuzzy multiple attribute decision making methods. Springer, Berlin, 1992), and can be considered as one of the classical MCDA methods that has received a lot of attention from scholars and researchers. It has been successfully applied in various instances; for a comprehensive state-of-the-art literature review, refer to Behzadian et al. (Expert Syst Appl 39(17):13051–13069, 2012). Table 1.1, adopted from that reference, presents the distribution of papers on TOPSIS by application areas.