TPPC 2015 - Special Issue on Theory and Practice of Pairwise Comparisons

Weights or weighted parameters/attributes are part of most measurement, indexing and/or classification techniques. However when judgments are subjective, weight assignment and especially weights consistency is almost always problematic. A ranking or preference is usually defined as a weakly ordered relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either “less preferred”, “more preferred” or “indifferent” to the second one. While most existing methods involve numbers, in many cases using only qualitative assessment might be more trustworthy. Formulas and rules involving numbers are considered as more scientific and credible than those that involve qualitative values only. This is obviously true when the notions of interest can be measured directly or indirectly, as for instance velocity, height, voltage, pressure etc. However, when it comes to subjective notions as love, importance, taste, beauty, etc., we have to be very careful when numbers are used. One of the ways to deal with such intangibile concepts is the pairwise comparisons (PC) method. The method based on the observation that it is much easier to judge the mutual relationship (preference, importance, intensity, etc.) of two objects than to do this for several objects.
Topics:
Original contributions, not currently under review or accepted by another journal, are solicited in relevant areas including (but not limited to) the following:
consistency definition and analysis,
weights assignment verification and refinement,
incomplete information,
purely qualitative models,
theory and application,
classification and data mining (with PC method),
software evaluation,
validation and certification,
risk assessment and analysis,
requirements engineering,
supply chain and logic management,
quality control and assurance, process control and optimization,
decision support systems (using PC Method).,
practical use of pairwise comparisons method ? case studies.
Editors for the Special Issue:
Ryszard Janicki (FI editor)
McMaster University, Canada
janicki-AT-cas.macmaster.ca
Konrad Kułakowski (guest editor)
AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
konrad.kulakowski-AT-agh.edu.pl