Two separate stages
Option ranking: How are options compared using the effective weights?
If you do not know your priorities, use DecisioQ's recommended priorities from the authoritative decision definition. If you know what matters more but not percentages, DecisioQ can guide pairwise comparisons and use AHP to derive weights. If your organization has established percentages, provide them directly. TOPSIS or WSM then consumes the effective weight vector; AHP is not a competing ranking algorithm.
Why Decision Catalog?
Decision Catalog captures professionally designed criteria, recommended weights, profiles, scenarios, constraints, and explanations. Most organizations should begin with this decision knowledge instead of designing weights from scratch.
1. Determine criterion importance
| Business choice | How weights are obtained | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Use DecisioQ recommended priorities | The current decision definition or selected profile supplies authoritative weights. | You do not yet know your priorities. |
| Help me determine priorities | AHP calculates weights from your complete pairwise judgments and checks their consistency. | You know what matters more but cannot assign percentages. |
| I'll provide the weights | Your values are validated against every authoritative criterionId and normalized. | Your organization already has established percentages. |
2. Choose how options are ranked
| WSM | TOPSIS |
|---|---|
| Use WSM when you want the final score to be the weighted sum of all criterion scores. It is transparent, easy to check manually, and allows strength in one criterion to offset weakness in another. | Use TOPSIS when you want to rank options by closeness to an ideal profile and distance from the least-desirable profile. |
Weighting feeds ranking
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TOPSIS or WSM ranking
Every weighting path produces one normalized effective weight vector. The selected ranking method consumes that same vector.
Recommended workflow
- Start with the selected decision and review its recommended priorities.
- Choose assisted AHP only when stakeholders can provide relative judgments.
- Provide manual weights only when established organizational percentages exist.
- Review the effective normalized weights and their business-level source.
- Select TOPSIS or WSM and validate recommendations against real outcomes.