Multi-criteria decision making methods: Application in the aviation industry

Bearing in mind that making decisions in the aviation industry is usually related to the huge investment, it is evident that a small saving of a few percent is not negligible. Decisions usually need to be made while considering different, very often opposing criteria that could be both quantitative and qualitative. Therefore, decision makers need to apply multi-criteria decision making methods which will help them in the decision making process. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify and classify the problems in the aviation industry that are solved by using multi-criteria decision making. In this research, 166 papers published in the period from 2000 to 2018 are reviewed. The papers are divided according to the application area in four groups: airlines, airports, air traffic management, and others. Each group refers to specific stakeholder in aviation, and it is further divided by selected theme dealt with in papers reviewed, into evaluation, selection, ranking, improving and other. Moreover, the application areas have been systematically analysed and the results are presented in the paper. Finally, the results of this research indicate that: a) multi-criteria decision making methods are mostly used in airlines; b) evaluation is the most commonly present theme; c) fuzziness is incorporated in 50% of papers; d) Analytic Hierarchy Process (including fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process) is applied in approximately 40% of reviewed papers; e) Taiwan ranks first as both authors’ affiliation country and presented case studies country.