Ranking Methods for Multicriteria Decision-Making: Application to Benchmarking of Solvers and Problems

Abstract

Evaluating the performance assessments of solvers (e.g., for computation programs), known as the solver benchmarking problem, has become a topic of intense study, and various approaches have been discussed in the literature. Such a variety of approaches exist because a benchmark problem is essentially a multicriteria problem. In particular, the appropriate multicriteria decision-making problem can correspond naturally to each benchmark problem and vice versa. In this study, to solve the solver benchmarking problem, we apply the ranking-theory method recently proposed for solving multicriteria decision-making problems. The benchmarking problem of differential evolution algorithms was considered for a case study to illustrate the ability of the proposed method. This problem was solved using ranking methods from different areas of origin. The comparisons revealed that the proposed method is competitive and can be successfully used to solve benchmarking problems and obtain relevant engineering decisions. This study can help practitioners and researchers use multicriteria decision-making approaches for benchmarking problems in different areas, particularly software benchmarking.