An analysis of the generalized TODIM method

Abstract

The TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for Interactive and Multicriteria Decision Making) method is a multicriteria procedure that is receiving increasing attention from the scientific community over the last few years. In this paper, we introduce a simplified version of this procedure, which allows us to easily show that this method is vulnerable to two paradoxes affecting the weights of the model. In order to overcome these inconsistencies, we propose a generalization of the TODIM method and establish conditions under which the previous paradoxes can be avoided. Moreover, we also show that the simple additive weighting (SAW) method and, under certain hypotheses, the PROMETHEE II method can be obtained as specific cases of the generalized TODIM method.