Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Chemical and Process Engineering: Methods, Progress and Potential

TL;DR

This paper reviews the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods in chemical and process engineering, highlighting key steps, methods, challenges, and introducing tools for MCDM calculations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MCDM methods in chemical engineering, including analysis of recent literature and new software tools for decision-making.

Findings

MCDM methods are widely applied in chemical engineering.

Normalization and weighting are critical steps in MCDM.

Two new programs for MCDM calculations are introduced.

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is necessary for choosing one from the available alternatives (or from the obtained Pareto-optimal solutions for multi-objective optimization), where the performance of each alternative is quantified against several criteria (or objectives). This paper presents a comprehensive review of the application of MCDM methods in chemical and process engineering. It systematically outlines the essential steps in MCDM, including the various normalization, weighting, and MCDM methods that are critical to the decision-making. The review draws on published papers identified through a search in the SCOPUS database, focusing on works by authors with more contributions to the field. Each selected paper is analyzed based on the MCDM, normalization and weighting methods used. Additionally, this paper introduces two readily available programs for performing MCDM calculations. In short, it provides insights into MCDM steps and methods, highlights their applications in chemical engineering, and discusses the challenges and prospects in this area.