VIKOR

Abstract

According to Opricovic (Multicriteria optimization of civil engineering systems. PhD Thesis, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Belgrade, 1998), the researcher who originally conceived VIKOR (the acronym is in Serbian: VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje, meaning multicriteria optimization and compromise solution), the method has been developed to provide compromise solutions to discrete multiple criteria problems that include non-commensurable and conflicting criteria. It has attracted much attention among researchers and has been applied in various areas (Table 2.1). Its theoretical background is closely related to TOPSIS that was presented in Chapter 1; they are both based on an aggregating function representing the “closeness to the ideal” (Opricovic and Tzeng, Eur J Oper Res 156(2):445–455, 2004). VIKOR is considered to be effective in cases where the decision maker cannot be certain how to express his/her preferences coherently and consistently at the initial stages of the system design. Yu (Manag Sci 19(8):936–946, 1973) and Zeleny (Multi criteria decision making. McGraw-Hills, New York, 1982) provide the setting theory for compromise solutions. Opricovic and Tzeng (Eur J Oper Res 156(2):445–455, 2004) state that “a compromise solution is a feasible solution, which is closest to the ideal, and a compromise means an agreement established by mutual concessions.” As such, the compromise solution can well serve as a basis for negotiations. VIKOR has been successfully applied among other domains to lean tool selection (Anvari et al. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 71(5–8):829–841, 2014), environmental management (Chang and Hsu, J Environ Manag 90(11), 3226–3230, 2009; Water Resour Manag 25(1):301–309, 2011), waste management (Liu et al., Appl Soft Comput 21, 453–461, 2014), social sustainability (Papathanasiou et al. Decision support systems vi – decision support systems addressing sustainability & societal challenges. Springer, New York, pp 3–15, 2016), facility location (Tzeng et al., Int J Hosp Manag 21(2):171–187, 2002), material selection (Jahan et al., Mat Des 32(3):1215–1221, 2011), and healthcare management (Zeng et al., J Med Syst 37(2):1–9, 2013). Like TOPSIS, VIKOR has been combined successfully with many different MCDA methodologies and other techniques. Table 2.1, adopted from Yazdani and Graeml (Int J Strateg Decis Sci 5(2):56–83, 2014), presents the distribution of papers on VIKOR by application areas, while Table 2.2, adopted from the same reference, shows techniques that were compared/combined with VIKOR.