Combining FUCA, CURLI, and Weighting Methods in the Decision-Making of Selecting Technical Products

Abstract

Determining the optimal one from the available alternatives is useful in numerous aspects of life. The process of selecting technical products from an available catalog also follows this pattern. This study was carried out to select the best from two types of technical products, the ones that serve in daily life at home, and products that are used in the agriculture field. Air conditioners and washing machines are considered indispensable items in every household. These two types of products directly affect human lives and also indirectly influence labor productivity. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used in numerous tasks in the agriculture field, such as inspecting irrigation systems, checking for factors that can harm agricultural products, etc. However, making the decision to buy one of those three types of products may become complicated. This research was conducted to select the best alternative for each of those products. The different types of air conditioners, washing machines, and drones considered in this study were 9, 8, and 7, respectively. Two methods, i.e. RS (Rank Sum) and PIPRECIA (PIvot Pairwise RElative Criteria Importance Assessment) were used to determine the weights for the criteria of each product category. The FUCA (Faire Un Choix Adéquat) method was used in combination with the two weighting methods mentioned above to rank the alternatives of each product category. The CURLI (Collaborative Unbiased Rank List Integration) method was used to complete this task. So, for each product category, there will be three different ranking results. An interesting thing has been achieved is that for each product category, these different ranking results gave the same best solution.