Evaluating the Effectiveness of Methods for Converting Ranking into Weights with Application for Maintenance Contractor Selection

Methods for converting ranks into weights are essential tools in multi-criteria decision making. This thesis addresses the problem of converting ranks into weights. It investigates the most effective methods for converting the ranks of several factors into weights. This is accomplished through a well designed simulation experiment, which analyzes and tests the methods under different conditions, such as different number of factors, and different decision maker behavior modeled through different distributions of random generated input for the weights and subsequently ranks associated with it.;The methods also are tested using a real life case, in the contest of prioritizing the essential factors for maintenance contractors pre-qualification. The results indicated that for the weights generated from the uniform distribution, the rank sum linear weight method is superior for twenty and fifteen factors scenarios; it also shows that the linear weights with variable slope method has superior performance if the number of factors are ten, and have much better performance when the number of factors is lower. In case the weight of factors are generated from the normal distribution, linear weights with variable slope method consider to be superior method for most of the cases of mean higher than 70 for all number of factor scenarios. Moreover, for lower mean, the superiority tend to scatter among different methods depends on the number of factors, mean and standard deviation associated, a table of best methods to follow for normal distribution was presented for different number of factors as well. Also, the centroid method performs the best for ranks generated from exponential distribution. The result for the case study indicates that linear weights with variable slope method is the best method to use, also results indicates that quality, experience, resource availability, safety performance and integrity are the most important factors in prequalifying maintenance contractor.;Key Words: Ordinal Ranking, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), Simulation, Maintenance Contractor(s) Prequalification...