Abstract:

Decision making and problem solving process constitute the basis of management activity in businesses. From primitive times until today, individuals have faced the problem of decision making in various situations. Decision making is the job of choosing between alternatives. In traditional decisions, data related to the decision process are collected and analyzed, and results are evaluated. However, decisions about situations or problems that people encounter in their daily lives often have more than one and often conflicting criteria. Considering this situation, using heuristic methods to reach a decision is insufficient. Versatile decision-making problems come across businesses and / or organizations in all areas of life. Decision makers mostly make decisions when there are more than one factor and criteria with different scalability. Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) can be defined as the decision-making process by using at least two criteria within a set of countably finite or uncountable choices. Especially, it will be convenient for managers at strategic level to operate Multi-Criteria Decision Making processes in order to make the most appropriate decision in complex decision problems. Multi-criteria decision making techniques consist of methods aiming to reach the “best fit” solution by using multiple criteria with different scalability. In this study, a Decision Support System that meets the decision-making needs of the manager by operating two different MCDM processes together is proposed. In this context, AHP (Analytic Hierarcy Process) and TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) MCDM methods were used together. AHP method was used to determine the weights of selection criteria, and TOPSIS method was used to rank the candidates in the light of determined criteria. Both MCDM methods mentioned are described as "single criteria synthesis approach excluding incommensurability".

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