Unweighted TOPSIS: a new multi-criteria tool for sustainability analysis

ABSTRACT

In this work, we show the usefulness of a new Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method, called Unweighted TOPSIS (uwTOPSIS), in helping decision making, aiming at achieving the objectives of sustainable development. uwTOPSIS is a new TOPSIS approach that does not require the decision-maker to determine the relative importance of each criterion. This makes the method more robust, since the results no longer depend on slight variations of such weights, and sustainable decisions therefore become more stable. In order to illustrate its applicability in real world problems, the results obtained with uwTOPSIS have been compared with those provided in two known study cases: the classification of Green Star hotels in Istanbul and the EU regional Social Progress Index (SPI). Moreover, all the results shown in this work can be easily reproduced since all the computations have been carried out using R statistical programming language through a self-developed package, uwTOPSIS, and the code used is included.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-Criteria Decision Making
• TOPSIS
• weighting schemes
• sustainable tourism
• Social Progress Index

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://github.com/rbensua/uwTOPSIS.

2. EUROSTAT, the European Environmental Agency, the Gallup World Poll, the Quality of Government Institute of the University of Gothenburg and Eurobarometer (Annoni et al. 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, project number: RTI2018-093541-B-I00.